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America's Nameless War With a Nameless Enemy
In the final presidential debate on October 22, President Barack Obama spoke briefly about the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on U.S. officials and personnel in Benghazi. He outlined why the U.S. had gone into Libya before the attack. He outlined the answers he is still seeking following the attack. But he did not say why this terrorist attack had occurred or why the U.S. had been ill-prepared to meet it in what is, after all, a volatile city alive with militias recently freed from dictatorial rule. Nor did he tell us why his Administration strenuously avoided calling it a terrorist attack for two weeks, preferring instead to speak of a spontaneous assault in the course of a demonstration of Muslims offended by an anti-Muhammad video. The implication of this apologetic gloss of the first two weeks is obvious: The Administration was saying that Ambassador Chris Stevens was not murdered by Islamists who hate America and its allies and mean to attack us again; he was the victim of the local reaction to one of the products of American freedom of speech. Once the attack was acknowledged as the handiwork of terrorists , however, the perpetrators were cited as being the followers of Al Qaeda, virtually the only officially acknowledged extremists. And here lies the problem: The Obama Administration will not acknowledge that an extreme and violent segment of the Muslim world ranging far beyond the confines of Al Qaeda is at war with us. To do so would have required him to explain why the U.S. had been empowering Islamists, including in Libya, some of whom may have been responsible for leaking information that enabled the terrorists to locate and kill the Americans. Just why and how has this refusal to name the Islamist enemy come to characterize the four years of Obama's presidency? President Obama agrees with the view that Islamists as a force in world affairs are not be shunned and that wisdom dictates coming to terms with those among them who are hot engaged in active hostilities at this moment. This view, however, is defective, because common to all Islamists is Muslim supremacism and the undeviating pursuit to subvert the non-Islamic world. Yet, since Barack Obama took office, Islamist antagonists, other than those involved in active hostilities like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, whose hostility cannot be denied or ignored, have gone unnamed. Presidential statements on the anniversaries of the 1983 killing of 242 U.S. servicemen in Lebanon by Hezballah or the 1979 seizure by Islamist students of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, to name two examples, failed to even mention the perpetrators of these acts, as it had become U.S. policy to propitiate both Hezbollah and the Islamists. Indeed, the Obama Administration has refused to associate attacks on America by Islamists with Islam. Administration officials have spent four years speaking about particular terrorists at home and abroad as isolated "extremists," even when Islamist terrorist connections were readily traceable (for example, the connection between the Fort Hood sniper Nidal Hassan and the American-born Al Qaeda in Yemen leader, Anwar al-Awlaki, who advised him). Posted by: Au Auric 2012-10-29 |
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