Earlier this week, President Obama lashed out at Donald Trump and others who criticized the president for refusing to say that the Orlando terrorist was motivated by radical Islamic ideology:
Despite what the president is arguing, the rationale for using the phrase is as old as Sun Tzu. It’s a simple matter of “know your enemy.” And since we live in a democratic republic, where every citizen bears some responsibility, however small, for determining the correct political and military response to outside threats, having our commander-in-chief correctly label the nature of that threat would seem important.
And despite Obama’s obfuscating rhetoric, Omar Mateen’s motivations are not exactly a mystery. The phone calls where he says things such as “I did it for ISIS. I did it for the Islamic State,” should be a pretty big tip off. This has all dutifully been reported, and for those people paying attention to the news, Obama’s choice of descriptors has been head scratching. At one point, Obama referred to the influence of “radical nihilistic vicious organizations.” He’s no Sun Tzu, but to paraphrase one of the great sages of our age, “Nihilists! I mean, say what you want about the tenets of Wahabism, at least it’s an ethos.”
If we take Obama at his word, we have to consider that his odd unwillingness to connect terror attacks to Islamist ideology is part of a particular strategy—and it’s one that the White House is especially committed to. Back in April, the White House actually censored French President Francois Hollande saying the phrase “Islamist terrorism.” The White House later blamed this on a technical error, but since they have a history of surreptitiously editing videos to suit their own political ends, that’s not terribly believable.
The problem for Obama is that in order to give him the benefit of the doubt, we have to trust that this decision to avoid stating the obvious is part of his grand anti-terror strategy. And there’s absolutely no reason to do that. We just had the largest terror attack in America since 9/11. The Taliban now controls more territory in Afghanistan than at any point since 2001. The president’s own diplomats are openly revolting over his Syria strategy, or more accurately, the lack of one. His big plan to fix the Middle East is to disengage and empower Iran, and his own advisers have gone so far as to brag about the deliberately deceptive and unlawful way the Iran deal was reached.
And in the wake of all this, Obama’s way of explaining the deaths of 49 Americans is the national security version of “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Under present circumstances, the only way you could think that this is an enlightened approach to dealing with Islamist terror attacks is if you are in a complete bubble.
