Obama’s “Whack-a-Mole” Dilemma

AS RADICAL ISLAMIC VIOLENCE ENGULFS IRAQ

by Paul R. Hollrah, ©2014

(Jun. 28, 2014) — As Barack Obama struggles with the question of whether or not to play “Whack-a-Mole” with Islamist insurgents in Iraq, a game that he threatened to play with radical Islamists in Libya and Syria but later rejected, he might want to consider a maxim attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.  Napoleon is quoted as saying, “Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.”

First, in the interest of fairness to Obama and the Jordanian military, we should dispense with the notion that he is clever enough to play both sides of the conflict in Iraq. It has been reported that some members of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) fighting in Syria and Iraq were trained by American instructors in Jordan. But we should not jump to the conclusion that those doing the training are in any way connected, formally or informally, to the U.S. government or to the U.S. military. If that were the case, Obama would be training ISIS insurgents in Jordan and then helping to kill them on the battlefield in the Iraqi desert. He’s simply not that clever.

In 2009, I was part of an international consulting group. Our team leader was a retired USAF officer once attached to the US Army’s 10th Special Forces Group. He also served as a program manager for NATO’s drug interdiction program for all of Europe and the Middle East. We were charged by high-ranking officers of the Jordanian military with the planning and development of a special operations training academy, the King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center (KASOTC) in Jordan. The purpose of the project was to train special operations personnel for states of the European community and for pro-Western nations of the Middle East.

We had no qualms about assembling a team of some of America’s most capable and experienced special operators because, at the insistence of our Jordanian clients, all potential trainees were to be thoroughly vetted to screen out radical Islamists and others with extreme views.

Unfortunately, the program we developed was never implemented. As we prepared to make our presentation in Amman we found that the project had been assigned, unexpectedly, to a lone Middle East operator with a personal relationship with the king. The same limitations placed on us would almost certainly have been placed on others. And although many in the mainstream media ascribe less than honorable motivations to those now doing the training, it is not certain that the ISIS fighters were trained at KASOTC facilities. If they were, we must assume that they somehow passed successfully through the KASOTC vetting process. It was never the intention of the Jordanians to train up radicalized Islamists.

However, there are lessons to be learned that heretofore we have failed to learn: First, in all of our dealings in the Islamic world, our policies must be based on the understanding that hatreds between the major factions of Islam are so deep and so intense that whatever commitments Islamists might make are, at best, unreliable. Since the concept of “Taqiyya,” as outlined in the Quran, allows Muslims to deceive non-Muslims, so long as the deception inures to the benefit of Islam, the commitment of a Muslim negotiator can never be taken at face value. When it comes to a choice between honoring a commitment to non-Muslims or honoring their devotion to their particular brand of Islam, their commitment to Islam will always win out.

Secondly, we should have learned from our experience in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Kuwait, Libya, and Syria that there is little to be gained by interfering in the internecine warfare between Sunnis and Shiites that has been ongoing since before the Middle Ages. And while it is always tempting to want to “do something” when we see Iraqi troops by the thousands shot or beheaded and dumped into mass graves, and when we see Muslim women oppressed, physically abused, and murdered by family members in honor killings, there is little that Western nations can do to prevent it. It’s just Muslims being Muslims.

An email received by a friend in recent days, sent from an American contractor in Iraq, says, “Fighting is bitter. ISIS does not take prisoners. ISIS is murdering/slaughtering captives and non-combatants alike. Like the NVA in Vietnam in the 1960s, ISIS has hit-lists with names of government officials, opposition, police (and) military personnel. All are marked for death. The ultimate slaughter will defy imagination.”

The atrocity that is Iraq today is a direct result of Barack Obama’s unwillingness/inability to negotiate a status-of-forces agreement with the Iraqi leadership, and it is difficult to see how the insertion of 300 special forces personnel can have any impact at all on the butchery that is sure to take place. Having expended some 4,500 American lives and trillions of dollars, our options are few. But what we can and must do is to insure that the most inhumane practices of the Muslim world stay where they are: in the Muslim world. We cannot allow Sharia Law to be imposed in the West. If Muslims wish to pass through the 21st century embracing 7th-century cultural norms, then let them do so. We should not attempt to impose our value systems on them, but we should take whatever steps are necessary to prevent them from despoiling our Western cultures.

The Dutch, for many decades the paragons of multiculturalism, have had enough. In a June 16, 2011 speech before the Dutch parliament, Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner announced, “The government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model and plans to shift priority to the values of the Dutch people. In the new integration system, the values of the Dutch people play a central role. With this change, the government steps away from the model of a multicultural society… it is not the government’s job to integrate immigrants.”

According to the report, the new legislation would require Muslim immigrants to learn the Dutch language, would outlaw forced marriages, and would impose “tougher measures against Muslim immigrants who lower their chances of employment by the way they dress.” Specifically, the legislation would impose a ban on face-covering burqas, effective January 1, 2013.

The Muslim infiltration of Europe is such that some very old cultures are in serious danger of extinction. In Sweden, for example, it is reported that one in every four women have been sexually assaulted, while more than three out of four convicted rapists in Sweden are Muslim immigrants from North Africa. When Swedish women appear in public with revealing necklines and short skirts, Muslim men simply assume that they are inviting sexual assault. Clearly, Muslims demonstrate no respect for the people or the laws of nations that have opened their doors to them, making the great liberal experiment in multiculturalism a complete failure.

In Iraq, as elsewhere in the world, so-called moderate Muslims are afraid to speak out. When confronted by ISIS insurgents, many Iraqi soldiers, trained by Americans, have thrown down their weapons and discarded their uniforms.

The man who now leads ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was in U.S. custody at Camp Bucca in Iraq. Before being captured he had a ten-million-dollar price on his head, yet after the Obama administration transferred him to Iraqi custody in 2009, he was released. Upon his release, he is quoted as saying to his American captors, “I’ll see you in New York.”

We cannot allow that to happen. Instead, we must begin to think in terms of severely limiting Muslim immigration into the United States and quarantining all Muslims to majority Muslim countries of Asia and the Middle East. The first step in the process should be the reestablishment of a congressional oversight process for investigating and identifying Islamic radicalism in U.S. mosques… similar to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of 1954.

The HUAC was abolished in 1975, but now, in the early years of the 21st century, as we find ourselves confronted by an enemy even more ruthless than the enemies we faced in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, the Congress should revitalize the process of identifying and deporting radical Islamists. If, as some Muslim apologists suggest, only 5 percent of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims are radicalized, the number of potential airplane hijackers and suicide bombers we face is approximately 70 million. In World War II, the combined military forces of Germany, Japan, and Italy numbered only 31.4 million… and they were identifiable because they wore uniforms.

As the prominent sociologist Ernest van den Haag said at the time of passage of the Communist Control Act of 1954, there is “no place in a democracy for those who want to abolish [it], even with a peaceful vote.”

Seeing his Iraq policy disintegrate before his very eyes, Obama feels obliged to do something, anything, to make it appear as if he knows what he’s doing. However, his plan to put 300 special operators on the ground in Iraq will accomplish absolutely nothing. He’d better pray that none of them are captured or killed and that they can be extracted, unharmed, when the time comes.  In the meantime, we might want to consider what former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger suggested during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. He said, “Let them fight it out and hope that both sides lose.”

It matters little to Muslims whether the conquest of the West takes 10 years, 100 years, or 1,000 years. They have infinite patience and the only way to deal with the threat is to confront it courageously, forthrightly, purposefully, and with no concern for what is politically correct.  Obama may be willing to play a game of “Whack-a-Mole” with radical Islam. What he seems incapable of understanding is that the people we are up against are more than willing to up the ante. They’d like nothing more than to play a game of “Nuke-a-Mole” with us.