What does it take? When does the American left catch on?
Barack Obama thinks he knows everything about everything. Just ask him. He’s never wrong. He cannot admit to being wrong. Anything that goes badly is someone else’s fault. (“I didn’t set the red line”, “I got bad intel.”) Wrong he has been and wrong he is.
This is highly revealing passage from an article written by Steve Hayes and Tom Jocelyn:
Four months before he was elected president, Obama traveled to Iraq for briefings on the war he had long opposed. He met with General David Petraeus, who was then seeking to consolidate U.S. and coalition gains resulting from the surge in American forces and the Anbar Awakening. When Petraeus insisted that Iraq, not Afghanistan, was the central front in the war against al Qaeda, Obama challenged him, arguing that Al Qaeda in Iraq—the organization that would grow to become ISIS—had little ambition or reach beyond Iraq.
According to an account of the meeting in The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, by New York Times correspondent Michael Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, Obama questioned “whether al Qaeda in Iraq presented a threat to the United States.” He said: “If AQI has morphed into a kind of mafia then they are not going to be blowing up buildings.” Petraeus pointed to an attempted attack in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2007, as an example of AQI’s reach and expressed concern about “the potential of AQI to expand its influence to Syria and Lebanon.” Obama was unmoved. “The al Qaeda leadership is not here in Iraq. They are there,” Obama said, pointing to Pakistan on a map.
It was an instructive exchange. Obama, a first-term senator with no experience in military or intelligence matters, challenged the general who had beaten back a jihadist insurgency in Iraq, led a remarkable turnaround in the country, and was a leading figure in America’s broader war on terror. The assessments Petraeus offered were based on years of personal experience guiding U.S. troops against jihadist armies generally, and Al Qaeda in Iraq specifically, and they were bolstered by mountains of intelligence reporting on the enemy, its objectives, and its practices.
Obama simply thought he knew better. His challenge wasn’t based on facts that contradicted Petraeus, or on facts at all. Rather, Obama made a series of assertions based on nothing more than his long-held conviction that Iraq was a distraction from the war on terror. And when he was presented with evidence that contradicted his thesis, Obama simply set it aside and restated his own view. It’s a pattern that would play out repeatedly throughout his presidency.
This is nothing less than astonishing. Obama shuts out anything and everything that does not fall in line with his world view, facts be damned.
Similarly, Obama does not read intelligence briefs that are in conflict with what he wants to believe:
Malzberg pressed Attkisson, “But you’re telling me that you’ve talked to people in his inner circle or in the administration that are telling you that even though there are groups that might be on our terror list that are classified as terrorist groups, Obama in his mind doesn’t consider them to be terrorists because what because they have a gripe?”
Attkisson explained, “I don’t know the reason for it. I’ve only been told by those who have allegedly attempted to present him or been in the circle that have attempted to present him with certain intelligence that they’ve said that he doesn’t want it. He said he doesn’t want it. Or he won’t read it in some instances.”
Obama’s policies are not based on facts, they’re based on what he chooses to believe.
Obama has seen to it that radical Muslim organizations dictate to the FBI how to conduct investigations and train agents, demanding that “offensive” terms such as “Muslim”, “Islam” and “jihad” be omitted.
A former FBI agent says:
Guandolo said the failure to recognize the domestic Islamist threat had allowed domestic jihadist groups and their sympathizers to shape U.S. government create policies that do not acknowledge jihad as the root cause for the current global chaos.
An example, he said, is that the FBI has appointed a domestic Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas support organization leader to an FBI advisory council at the Washington headquarters.
Additionally, the FBI is failing to train agents and analysts on the Muslim Brotherhood network in the United States, Guandolo said.
“The FBI, no matter how diligent its agents are in their pursuit of ‘terrorists’, will never defeat this threat because its leaders refuse to address or even identify it,” he said. “This level of negligence on the part of the FBI leaders and their failure to understand the jihadi threat 13 years after 9/11 is appalling.”
Military leaders – such as Gen. Michael Flynn- who find themselves frustrated by Obama’s hamstringing of their efforts to fight ISIS are pushed out of power and often subject to smear campaigns. To wit:
U.S. military pilots who have returned from the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq are confirming that they were blocked from dropping 75 percent of their ordnance on terror targets because they could not get clearance to launch a strike, according to a leading member of Congress.
Flynn asserts that Obama’s policy toward ISIS is one of confusion:
I think what the American people is looking for, is they are looking for moral courage and clarity and not a sense of passivity or confusion. I think there’s confusion about what it is we’re facing. It’s not defined as just 40,000 fighters in the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria. It’s also a large segment within that radical version of Islam that is threatening our way of life.”
Flynn echoes what is so obvious to everyone but Obama and his idiot sycophants:
He also slammed the administration for refusing to use the term “Islamic militants” in its description of ISIS and al Qaeda.
“You cannot defeat an enemy you do not admit exists,” Flynn said.
King Abdullah of Jordan has called the ISIS conflict a “third world war” and more:
“This is a war, as I’ve said repeatedly, within Islam.”
He gets it. Russia gets it. France gets it.
Obama doesn’t get it. He refuses to get it. To paraphrase Obama:
The future must not belong to those who would tell the truth about Islamic jihadists.
Obama’s response to the Paris attacks was strangely detached but one thing that fires him up is any American daring to question his omniscience:
He could have acknowledged people’s qualms as legitimate and argued at greater length, as former Ambassador to Iraq and Syria Ryan Crocker did in the Wall Street Journal, that we have processes in place that would effectively screen out terrorists. Or he could have proposed, like Speaker Paul Ryan, a pause before accepting any.
But that would have meant not taking cheap shots against the political opposition at home — the people who really make him angry.
Al Qaeda is not decimated. ISIS is not jayvee. Iran is not our friend. Terrorists sent by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula are not isolated extremists. Attempted bombings by operatives dispatched by the Pakistani Taliban are not one-off attacks. Planned assaults on American facilities overseas are not protests. Groups blowing up airliners are not contained. September 11 was not an episode. Mass casualty attacks are not setbacks.
The long war is not over.
For certain, Obama is going to continue to bark at Americans from the banks of Da Nile.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.