The four years of The Regime’s failing foreign policy are as much the consequence of bad ideas and practices as they are the Obama-promised fundamental transformational demise of America.
We the People must either bring all the Obama treasonists to justice and stop America’s demise or be forced to learn Sharia Law.
This from frontpagemag.com.
The conflict ignited by Hamas’ war crimes on October 7 features additional painful lessons The Regime’s foreign policy and national security mavens have ignored:
– U.S. forces in the region have been attacked 170 times by Iranian proxies, with scores of U.S. troops wounded, some critically, and three killed,
– [The Regime] has responded with [mere] telegraphed and limited missile attacks on proxy assets in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and the Red Sea, and
– [Unsurprisingly,] the aggression against our forces and international shipping has persisted.
Clearly, Iran is providing targeting information to the Houthis’ attacks on commercial and military shipping in the Red Sea. Yet Iran continues to be given the Obama wink and nod along with the honorable mention pass.
Worse yet, the Regime’s foreign policy behind Obama is marching to new-world-order direction. Think: “diplomatic engagement” and “negotiated settlements.”
The former is chin-wagging with photo ops, the latter mere ‘parchment barriers.’ They create the illusion of action, while avoiding the uncertainty and unforeseen contingencies that attend the use of force on the scale needed to concentrate the mullahs’ minds and reinvigorate our weakened deterrence power.
The Regime is seemingly caught between purposely avoiding Iranian targets yet dumbfoundedly emboldening them to perform further aggression.
Then there’s the bogeyman of ‘escalation,’ which doesn’t trouble Iran and its proxies, but does paralyze the [once] greatest military power in world history.
But as Alan Dershowitz pointed out:
There are, of course, alternatives less than all-out war, and more than attacks on proxies. They involve the bombing of military targets inside Iran. These include sites used for Iran’s nuclear program, its naval bases and ships, its military drone production, its oil and gas facilities and its command centers. All of these could be accomplished from the air and sea without a ground invasion, and without the loss of American lives an invasion would risk.
And how about restoring the “punitive sanctions” and “maximum pressure” that President Trump put on Iran’s economy? Or taking out the commander of the expeditionary Quds Force Esmail Qaani, whose predecessor, Qassem Soleimani, President Trump obliterated?
The foreign policy big brains squealed that Trump was being reckless and sparking a regional conflict.
But Iran merely responded like the West, putting on a cruise-missile fireworks show that accomplished nothing. In fact, the whole region was pretty calm during Trump’s four years.
Actually, the history from which we have failed to learn does not have to go back to the Twenties and Thirties of the 20th century for monitory examples, “when the serial appeasement of Germany began before the ink was dry on the Versailles Treaty and ended in the most destructive war in history.” The Nineties and the rise of al Qaeda provide enough foreign policy blunders “shameful in the conception and shameful in the result.”
The first calamitous warning was the 1993 bombing of the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center, the first of several other bombings planned for the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the United Nations building.
Though the explosion did not cause the destruction and the mass casualties the terrorists had hoped for, the audacity of the attack against the world’s greatest infidel power heartened and inspired jihadists across the globe, especially Osama bin Laden and the jihadist group al Qaeda he founded in 1988.
The Clinton administration failed to seriously heed the nature of this enemy and its jihadist motives based on 14 centuries of Islamic precepts and doctrine.
Bin Laden’s many rationales for attacking the infidel Americans were dismissed as the ravings on an “extremist,” a “heretic,” a “beard from the fringe,” or a kooky cultist like Jim Jones or David Koresh. Yet bin Laden’s sermons on American degeneracy and weakness were based on orthodox Islamic “creed,” as he said, and reprised the arguments of the neo-jihadist Muslim Brotherhood, the premier influence on modern Islamic jihadism.
As the Nineties progressed, this rhetoric became a gruesome reality:
– In November 1995, a car bombing killed five Americans in a U.S.-Saudi training facility in Riyadh,
– In June 1996, another car bomb killed 19 Americans and wounded 372 in a residential complex housing Air Force personnel near Dhahran. Bin Laden credited those murders with the U.S. reductions of its number of troops in Saudi Arabia,
– In August 1998, al Qaeda launched simultaneous attacks on two U.S. embassies in east Africa. In the Nairobi bombing, 12 Americans died, and
– In October 2000, a fishing boat full of explosives blew a 40-by 40-foot hole in the destroyer U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors and wounding 39.
And as a result of these seven years of calamitous warnings, no thought processes were altered and no behaviors were changed:
– None of these lethal attacks on our military personnel were met with serious reprisals. The usual post-Vietnam fear and political costs of ‘escalation,’ along with photogenic dead troops and foreign civilians, inhibited President Clinton’s response,
– More dangerous, the Clinton foreign policy team, which included holdovers from Jimmy Carter’s administration, were internationalists reluctant to use force, and didn’t grasp the deeply religious motivations of Islamic jihadists. To Clinton’s team, as Daniel Pipes wrote, ‘most Islamists were seen as decent people, serious individuals’ who, according to the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East, were espousing ‘a renewed emphasis on traditional values.” Unfortunately, those traditions included the Koran injunction to ‘kill the infidel wherever you find him,’
– Clinton’s responses to those attacks were tentative and limited. The murders in Riyadh were treated as a criminal. Then as now, the attackers were aided by Iran, and kinetic retaliation was discussed but, as one White House official wrote, ‘The anger was never fortified by any coherent depth of thought or planning. Every tactic brought up soon ran out of support or was forgotten. It was all momentary,’
– Also then, as now, strategically useless, showy barrages of cruise missiles substituted for action. For example, in August 1998, a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan misidentified as a chemical weapons manufacturer was destroyed, killing a night watchman and putting 300 people out of work. In another useless display, 66 cruise missiles were fired at two al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan that bin Laden supposedly was visiting. Six militants were killed, but bin Laden had just left for Kabul. At a cost of $70 million dollars, as CIA officer Michael Scheuer put it, the attack had done ‘the work of day laborers armed with thirty-dollar sledgehammers,’ and
– Finally, then as now, [weak] rules of engagement squandered several opportunities to take bin Laden out.
The results of all that weak leadership and failure to act decisively were the smoking ruins in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania, and 2996 dead.
So, here we go again. The lessons from history are that bad ideas and practices continue to be tried repeatedly.
