CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: It is ridiculous to go back to the pre-9/11 paradigm of treating acts of terror as criminal acts. They are not. They are acts of war against the United States. And when Holder says we’re going to track down the people who did this, I mean, it’s as if FDR were to announce the day after Pearl Harbor that we’re going to track down the pilots who bombed us in Pearl Harbor.
The whole idea here is to understand we’ve we made a terrible mistake for decades pre-9/11 in pursuing criminal offenses as individual acts rather than understanding that we have in ISIS an entity that is armed, has a ton of money, a ton of recruits, controls an enormous amount of territory and has declared open war on the United States of which the beheading of that journalist or that American was simply one instance. And unless the president understands that and we have no strategy and we have no way. The idea is not to bring anybody to justice, it is to defeat the army, essentially, the people who are running the operation. That’s what we learned from 9/11 and I’m not sure the president has learned it yet…
Well, I hope it’s the Defense Department that is going to take care of this. It’s the only answer that makes any sense. It’s the only answer that ISIS respects. I mean, remember in 2000 we had an attack on the U.S.S. warship, the Cole. It was a year before 9/11 and what did the Clinton administration do? It sent FBI agents into Yemen to find the perpetrators instead of understanding that this is an act of war. You would think we learned our lesson on 9/11.
The point here is the only response to this beheading which will be understood by ISIS is a vigorous air campaign against them, supporting the troops on the ground, not American, there are boots on the ground, Iraqis and Kurdish, who just retook the Mosul Dam, who have succeeded in pushing back ISIS from the outskirts of Kurdistan. They have had success, they need U.S. air power, that’s the proper response. It’s not sending a prosecutor over to gather evidence about the beheading.
Video at the link