Vancouver Secrets

Obama’s Dangerous Strategy

Bill Kristol Takes The Obama Administration to task for the way they are handling terror.

“Closing the embassy in Yemen last night? No one wants State Department officials put at risk, but that is a sign of weakness. Closing the embassy?  We can’t protect our own embassy in Yemen, a place where we have special operations forces. A place we say we’re working with the government on the front lines of the war on terror?  And there’s a terror threat, and we close the embassy?

Kristol’s damning summation: “That’s a victory for al Qaeda. This last week has been a victory for al Qaeda in that region, I’m afraid.”

Starting to be shades of the past when the US handled terror as an inconvenience. Obama needs to quit worrying about what Dick Cheney says and start working on fighting a war that he is (reluctantly) in.

Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan.. you have to wonder if Obama is up to the task?

Charles Krauthammer jumps in:

The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration’s response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to downplay and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism “man-caused disasters.” Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York — a trifecta of political correctness and image management.

This is all quite mad even in Obama’s terms. He sends 30,000 troops to fight terror overseas, yet if any terrorists come to attack us here, they are magically transformed from enemy into defendant.

The logic is perverse. If we find Abdulmutallab in an al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen, where he is merely preparing for a terror attack, we snuff him out with a Predator — no judge, no jury, no qualms. But if we catch him in the United States in the very act of mass murder, he instantly acquires protection not just from execution by drone but even from interrogation.

The president said that this incident highlights “the nature of those who threaten our homeland.” But the president is constantly denying the nature of those who threaten our homeland. On Tuesday, he referred five times to Abdulmutallab (and his terrorist ilk) as “extremist(s).”

A man who shoots abortion doctors is an extremist. An eco-fanatic who torches logging sites is an extremist. Abdulmutallab is not one of these. He is a jihadist. And unlike the guys who shoot abortion doctors, jihadists have cells all over the world; they blow up trains in London, nightclubs in Bali, and airplanes over Detroit (if they can); and they are openly pledged to wage war on America.

Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy — jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon — turns laxity into a governing philosophy.

Victor Davis Hansen has some great “war on terror” 2010 predictions here.