TITLE HAVE WE WON THE WAR?
But it would get worse... As next came Barack Obama and an utter volte face in our terrorism policy. No longer would we be in a global war against terrorists and their “Axis of Evil” sponsors. In fact, clarity and moral conviction would be jettisoned as the architects of Obama’s response would generate Orwellian phrases such as “upstream factors” to explain away terrorism or blame it on economic and political grievances, not religious conviction and ideology. So bad would this politically motivated distortion of the reality that was the post- 9/11 world become, that the Obama Administration would eventually ban words such as “Jihadism” from government training and blackball any expert who dared link the clearly religiously motivated acts of Al Qaeda to any aspect of Islam. Then of course there came the disastrous decision to placate the Shia terror state in Tehran with the Iran nuclear deal in a desperate attempt to balance out the rise of Sunni extremism, followed by the precipitous withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and the subsequent rise of ISIS. By this point, Obama would try to convince Americans that groups like ISIS were a “generational” threat we had to learn to live with. And then America chose a non-politician for her Commander in Chief... When the Trump Administration came into the White House, we utterly rejected the Obama article of faith that we just have to live with terror attacks, beheading videos,
and ISIS slave markets. Soon after, President Donald Trump unleashed our military, stripped them of the outrageous restrictions put upon them by his predecessor, and gave them a simple mission: destroy the physical Caliphate ISIS had built in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Less than six months later, Obama’s “generational” threat was no more. Yes indeed, elections have consequences. Have we killed every terrorist? No. Will new ones be recruited? Of course. But the lesson of the last 19 years is crystal clear: We have the greatest military the world has ever seen. And if you have faith in them, believe in America, and have strategic objectives that are rooted in reality, we can crush any foe. We have the greatest military the world has ever seen. And if you have faith in them, believe in America, and have strategic objectives that are rooted in reality, we can crush any foe.
Sebastian Gorka PhD was Strategist to President Trump and served as a professor for counterterrorism studies in the Department of Defense and at
the Marine Corps University. Today, he serves as presidential appointee on the National Security Education Board and is host of AMERICA First. SebGorka.com
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September 2020
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