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Right Analysis | Right Hooks | Right Opinion
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Alexander's Column
The Escalating Cost of Obama's Foreign Policy Failures
Just Invoice the Next President
By Mark Alexander · December 2, 2015 
"There is a rank due to the United States, among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war." —George Washington, 1793
Many reading these words are serving or have served our country in uniform, or have military or veteran family members. For many of us, the ever-inflating price of Barack Obama's costly foreign policy malfeasance will be paid with the blood and sweat of us or of those we love. Thus, his failures come with a much more visceral price than just rancorous armchair political debates.
While Obama intends to invoice the next administration with the political, economic and human cost of his failures, there are additional revelations this week affirming the political motivations for his failures*.
As anyone capable of evaluating the most rudimentary cause-and-effect outcome can deduce, the rise of the Islamic State is the direct result of Obama's politically motivated retreat from Iraq, the centerpiece of his 2012 re-election campaign. But his suspension of the Long War strategy to defeat radical Islamic terrorists is only temporary. Taking the fight back to our enemy's turf in order to keep it off of our own will be far more difficult now than it was when President George Bush launched Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom.
The consequences of Obama's policies will be devastating for years to come.
The legacy of Obama's failed policies, as implemented by his chief water-carrier Hillary Clinton, is the brutal humanitarian crisis now underway in Syria and across the Middle East. While he was fiddling a tune about al-Qa'ida's decimation and Islamist JV teams, even his CIA director, John Brennan, was issuing dire warnings about the metastasizing threat to the West.
According to Brennan, in 2008 al-Qa'ida "had maybe 700 or so adherents left." But now, as American Enterprise Institute scholar and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen notes, "[B]y the CIA's own estimate, ISIS has grown on President Obama's watch from just 700 fighters to between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters. That is an increase of between 2,700 and 4,400%."
Recall if you will the prophetic warning issued by George W. Bush in July of 2007: "To begin withdrawing from Iraq ... will be dangerous — for Iraq, for the region and for the United States. It will mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al-Qa'ida. It means that we would be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It will mean we would allow terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they had in Afghanistan. It will mean that American troops will have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous."
This week, Obama announced that he intends to resolve our differences with this murderous Islamist army by implementing his utopian "climate change" agenda. As George Will put it, "Everything is said to confirm global warming, and global warming is now said to cause everything else. It is a theory which can no longer be refuted, which means it is no longer a scientific theory." According to Obama, there is a correlation between a terrorism and a two-degree rise in the temperature over the last 200 years.
Shamefully — and yet predictably — Obama has ceded the lead role in the re-emerging "war on terror" to France and Russia. In the wake of the recent slaughter in Paris, a petulant Obama insisted, "I'm not interested in posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning."
The words of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" protagonist, Aragorn, are instructive here: "Open war is upon you whether you would risk it or not."
Meanwhile, Obama continues to advance his Syrian immigrant plan even though, according to an Islamic-friendly organization, more than 13% of Syrian migrants support the Islamic State. Multiply .13 x 2,000,000 "refugees" and consider the national security implications for the West.
Make no mistake: The same sort of bloody mayhem we witnessed in Paris within hours of Obama's assertion that "we have contained" the Islamic threat is coming to a theater near you. Indeed, a timeline review of the frequency of Islamist attacks in the U.S. clearly shows a sharp increase beginning with Obama's first year in office.
Last year, then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) delivered this domestic terrorism threat assessment: "I've never seen it this bad in the 10 years I've been on the intelligence committee." Since then, our enemy has only become stronger — and more brazen.
After five military personnel were murdered by an Islamist in Tennessee six months ago, FBI Director James Comey testified, "The tools we are asked to use are increasingly ineffective. ISIL says, 'Go kill, go kill.' I cannot see [the FBI] stopping these indefinitely."
As Obama opens the gates for an Islamic Trojan Horse, Comey issued this disturbing assessment of our inability to recognize ISIL terrorists among Syrian immigrants: "[I]f someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing showing up because we have no record of them."
Recall also Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's grim assessment last year that the direct links between ISIL and domestic terror networks have created "the most diverse array of threats and challenges I've seen in my 50-plus years in the [intelligence] business." He added, "When the final accounting is done, 2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years such data has been compiled. ... I don't know of a time that has been more beset by challenges and crises around the world. I worry a lot about the safety and security of this country. ... The homegrown violent extremists continue to pose the most likely threat to our homeland."
Now there is evidence that, in addition to the Benghazi political cover-up, the Obama/Clinton team also suppressed critical intelligence retrieved from Osama bin Laden's compound about ties between Iran and al-Qa'ida. Apparently the administration determined that such information would be detrimental to Obama's signature "Iranian nuke deal." (Oh, did I mention that Iran never signed off on that agreement, meaning the inspection schedules are not legally binding?)
According to The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, "From 2011 through 2013, top Obama administration and intelligence officials downplayed and discarded intelligence on al Qaeda and its activities. ... A top DIA official was told directly to stop producing reports based on documents collected during the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound. And when a member of the House Intelligence Committee sought to investigate these allegations of manipulation, he was misled repeatedly."
Would it surprise anyone to learn that the Obama administration put pressure on U.S. Central Command analysts to paint a rosier picture of the Islamic threat? More than 50 CENTCOM analysts issued formal complaints about the alteration of intelligence, and the DoD's inspector general has opened a full investigation. Indeed, as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) confirmed, "Informants came to me in late 2012 stating that they had information related to the bin Laden raid and the analysis of intelligence," which was buried by the administration.
According to DoD's IG spokesperson Bridget Serchak, "The investigation will address whether there was any falsification, distortion, delay, suppression or improper modification of intelligence information."
When asked about that investigation, Obama declared with a straight face, "What I do know is my expectation, which is the highest fidelity to facts, data — the truth."
Obama's former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who held that post until August of 2014, said this week that intelligence reports were "disregarded" by Obama if they "did not meet a particular narrative that the White House needed" for Obama's re-election. "Intelligence starts and stops at the White House," notes Flynn. "The president sets the priorities and he's the number one customer."
Additionally, Lt. Gen. Flynn went public about Iran's support for terrorist attacks against American military personnel, and he asserts that Obama is in denial about the Islamic threat: "You cannot defeat an enemy you do not admit exists."
In congressional hearings this week, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford, with the candor one would expect from a seasoned Marine, summarily dispensed with Obama's "containment of ISIL" claim: "We have not contained ISIL." He noted, "We've started to identify and implement a number of initiatives to move the campaign forward."
According to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, one of those initiatives will be deployment of a "specialized expeditionary targeting force" to Iraq — a.k.a., more "boots on the ground."
For the record, I've also identified "initiatives to move the campaign forward." Unfortunately, we can't implement them until January 2017, and only then if enough American voters wake up to the threat and make their voices heard at the ballot box.
If we don't rejoin the global war on terror, then get prepared for what Osama bin Laden labeled "American Hiroshima." Hamid Mir, the Pakistani journalist who obtained the only post-9/11 interviews with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, surmised, "Al-Qa'ida and Iran have a long, secret relationship," and their ultimate goal would be to detonate a series of portable nuclear devices in U.S. urban centers.
The combined threat of ISIL and Iranian nukes, if not neutralized, poses a far more catastrophic threat than that we witnessed on 9/11.
And speaking of ballot boxes, Non Compos Mentis: According to Hillary Clinton, "We're not putting America combat troops back into Syria or Iraq. We are not going to do that. ... I cannot conceive of any circumstances where I would agreed to [put combat troops on the ground]." So, two weeks after the attack in Paris, Clinton can't "conceive of any circumstances" for committing combat troops?
*We often refer to Obama's foreign policy as "failed," but the reality is that Obama is achieving his ulterior objective both foreign and domestic. That objective is socialist parity, and in terms of foreign policy, that means disabling our status as the world's lone superpower in order to allow other nations to fill that void. Foreign and domestic policy "failures"? Sadly, no. This president's policies are achieving precisely his intended objectives.
Pro Deo et Constitutione — Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
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