We Americans are great talkers but often are not great listeners. What we hear, we often mistake because we see our adversaries more as we see ourselves than as they may really be.
And so it must be in politics. Though he is for conservatives a political adversary, not an enemy — and the distinction is important — we have to take Barack Obama at his word just as we do those with whom we are at war.
There are plenty of Obama words to listen to, analyze and believe. His intention is to lose the war in Iraq, to fight wildly and blindly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to talk Iran out of its nuclear weapon ambitions.
Way back in March 2004, Obama said the president should set a firm date to begin withdrawing American forces from Iraq. He wavered in several 2005 statements, but in June 2006 he sponsored and voted for an unsuccessful amendment to establish troop withdrawal.
In November 2006, he was back to the idea that we’d withdraw on a set timetable. In remarks to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, he said that the first part of his strategy “begins by exerting the greatest leverage we have on the Iraqi government — a phased redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq on a timetable that would begin in four to six months.”
And in January 2007, sponsoring a bill to mandate a set date to withdraw, Obama told reporters he would press for a Senate vote on his bill to begin redeployment of U.S. forces by May 1 with a goal of removing all combat troops by March 31, 2008.
Despite all the obfuscations, slips and turns, we must conclude that Obama will withdraw American troops from Iraq, regardless of the conditions on the ground. As a result, Iraq will be lost.
Iraq will cease to exist, splitting up into at least three separate regions dominated by Iran in the south and east, by Syria and Saudi Arabia in the center, and a northern Kurdish area likely to be conquered by Turkey.
It will be, for decades to come, a terrorist breeding ground. The war there will be lost.
Obama seems ignorant of the fact that there is only one war, between civilization and hegemony of radical Islam.
That war will go on as long as nation-states sponsor terrorism in the name of Islam.
Obama apparently believes that there is no such war, and fails to perceive that it is as much an ideological war (for radical Islam is not a religion, but an ideology) as a kinetic one. And he also does not understand that that ideology must be defeated as Nazism and communism — its forebears — were in turn.
In Quetta, Pakistan, we had (at least two years ago) hard intelligence that the Taliban have set up headquarters in specific locations. (One Marine officer told me of 14 single-spaced pages of actionable intelligence on the Taliban we have given the Pakistani government, which they refused to act upon).
And there is worse, still. Two very senior White House officials told me there are about 1 million Islamic fighters in Pakistan’s tribal areas, given safe haven from which to operate against Western interests in Afghanistan and beyond. They characterized it as the worst safe-havens problem on the planet.
We must take Obama at his word. His actions — small raids into Pakistan, redeploying substantial combat power into Afghanistan without any clear objective or strategy — would probably result in the toppling of Pakistan’s quasidemocratic government to be replaced by a government of the ISI, Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence Agency, which is a government within a government there.
The ISI created the Taliban and still supports them. If it takes over the Pakistani government, regardless of what happens in Iran, there will be a radical Islamic nuclear power.
Human Events editor and New York Times best-selling author Jed Babbin wrote “In the Words of Our Enemies.”
