Armageddon (15 page)

President Obama famously weighed in, showing how lightly he took the rising power of ISIS. In an interview with
New Yorker Magazine
editor David Remnick on January 7, 2014, Obama said, “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant.”
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After the ISIS attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, it is clear how stupidly, grievously, and tragically wrong the administration's assessment was. It now is becoming clear that ISIS exists to attack the West. But still Obama—with Hillary following after him—fails to grasp the true nature of the threat ISIS poses.

After all, Hillary has stood solidly behind Obama's inept treatment of ISIS. In the third Democratic presidential debate, Hillary incredibly said, “We finally have ISIS exactly where we want them.”
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And Obama insisted during a visit to Turkey in November 2015 that “the strategy that we are pursuing is the right one.”
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As the ISIS threat became clearer, Obama stuck with his refusal to make the kind of troop commitment that would
hobble these terrorists. Committed to a strategy of air strikes and no ground troops, Obama has imposed such restrictions on our air campaign that pilots report coming back from sorties with only a quarter of their bombs dropped. Where Republicans vow to do what it takes to beat ISIS, Obama keeps our efforts to a minimum.

Nor have Obama or Hillary has gotten the message that toppling secular dictatorships in the Middle East opens the door to ISIS-like groups taking over, just as they did in Iraq. Throughout the Middle East, they are not content to leave well enough alone, and insist on ousting dictators wherever they find them, regardless of the risk that somebody worse will succeed them.

Donald Trump puts the American policy options in a broader perspective. “The United States owes $19 trillion,” he said. “We have to straighten out our own house. We cannot go around to every country that we're not exactly happy with and say we're going to recreate [them]. It hasn't worked,” Trump added. “Iraq was going to be a democracy. It's not gonna work, OK? It's not gonna work and none of these things will work.” Referring to Iraq, he said, “We're nation-building. We can't do it. We have to build our own nation. We're nation-building, trying to tell people who have [had] dictators or worse for centuries how to run their own countries. . . . Look what's happened in Iraq. We got rid of Saddam Hussein. I don't think that was a helpful thing. Iraq is a disaster right now and it's going to be taken over by Iran and ISIS, so I think we have to focus on ourselves.”
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But Obama and Hillary have not gotten the message. They backed the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and almost opened the door to domination of that strategic country by the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood. Only the determined efforts of the Egyptian Army were able to depose the extremist government that had taken over in Cairo.

Hillary's complicity in allowing a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated regime under Mohamed Morsi may have been influenced by her close
connection to the Brotherhood's leader. Morsi's wife Nagla Mahmoud spoke of the “special relationship” between her husband and Hillary. Indeed, when Clinton criticized Morsi in public—likely in an effort to appease his successor Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a former Field Marshall in the Egyptian Army—Mrs. Morsi threatened to “publish letters exchanged between her husband and Hillary.”
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Indeed, Hillary's Clinton Foundation and the Muslim Brotherhood shared a high-ranking employee, Gehad el-Haddad, who worked for the foundation right before going to Egypt and serving as Morsi's top communication official.

Next door to Egypt, in Libya, Hillary again worked to oust a dictator, opening the door to massive terrorist and Islamist infiltration of the government. Muammar Gaddafi was no angel. He was a vicious dictator who was behind the Lockerbie jetliner attack that killed 270 people. The Libyan tyrant was defanged when President Reagan ordered an aerial attack on his home, killing his son in retaliation for Lockerbie.

After that raid, Gaddafi stopped his attacks on the West. Then, when President George W. Bush toppled Saddam Hussein from power, Gaddafi saw the handwriting on the wall and voluntarily gave up his arsenal of biological and chemical weapons and ended his efforts to develop or acquire nuclear weapons. He was still a miserable excuse for a human being, but he was minding his own business. Then Hillary decided he was committing human rights abuses. Eager to please Obama's key aide, Samantha Powers, who made her name speaking out against genocide in Rwanda, she set her sights on ousting Gaddafi.

Egged on by Hillary, Obama joined NATO in mounting air attacks that supported rebel ground troops. When they succeeded in toppling Gaddafi, the world saw that there was no genocide taking place, a situation reminiscent of George W. Bush's surprise at not finding weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. But at least Bush followed the intelligence of his government in assuming that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had WMDs. Hillary, by contrast,
deliberately overrode the findings of the US intelligence agencies and decided that genocide was, indeed, taking place.

After Gaddafi fell, all hell broke loose. Naively, Hillary hoped that “good” rebels who advocated a democratic, sectarian government for Libya would take over. But as many experts had warned, they were thrown into retreat by Islamic fundamentalists allied with ISIS and al-Qaeda. Our consulate in Benghazi was attacked and our ambassador Chris Stevens was killed along with three brave American guards. But Hillary still didn't learn the lesson.

Hillary then clamored for Obama to intervene in Syria to depose yet another dictator, Bashar al-Assad. At first, after al-Assad took over from his father who had ruled Syria with an iron hand for decades, he promised reform. Hillary, deceived as usual, promoted him as a “possible reformer” in March 2011. But when al-Assad Jr. used poison gas against his own people as his nation erupted into civil war, Hillary swung over to the other side, calling for bold American action to depose him. Led by around by the nose by his secretary of state, Obama worked to arm the prodemocracy rebels in Syria.

Idiotically, Obama and Hillary said that the weapons were only for pro-Western Syrian rebels who rejected both al-Assad's horrific dictatorship and ISIS's terrorism. But the fact is that they had no idea who was really getting the weapons. And sure enough, they next surfaced in the hands of the ISIS forces, giving the organization the arms it needed to conquer large swaths of Iraq and Syria. The idea of prodemocracy rebels in Syria proved as illusory as it had in Iraq, Libya, and Egypt. ISIS took over, merging with affiliates in Iraq to present an unprecedented crisis to the West.

So here's Hillary's record:

• • She did nothing to stop President Obama from pulling our troops out of Iraq, opening the door to the growth of ISIS.
  
• • She assisted in the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt and acquiesced in his replacement by Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader.
  
• • She led efforts to topple Gaddafi in Libya, setting up an opportunity for Islamist terrorists to infiltrate and fight for control of that government.
  
• • She pushed for arms shipments to the “prodemocracy” rebels in Syria who proved too weak to keep control of the armaments and they now arm ISIS in its battle against us.
  

Quite a record!

Even as ISIS and its allies took hold in Iraq and Syria, Obama—with Hillary's backing—refused to take bold action against it, eventually settling for limited, pinpoint air strikes that do little to crimp the terror organization's growth.

With Hillary's support, Obama even refused to attack the oil fields that provided ISIS with half of its revenues. These oil wells, formerly controlled by the Baghdad government, pumped an estimated 120,000 barrels a day, bringing in at least $2 million each day to fund the army of mercenaries who fought at ISIS's behest. Why not attack? Because, according to Obama's former CIA director Mike Morrell, the president feared doing so would inflict “environmental damage.”
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Donald Trump will not abide such nonsense. He said he'd “bomb the hell” out of oil sites that are controlled by ISIS. He said “the situation with [ISIS] has to be dealt with firmly and strongly when you have people being beheaded. I would do things that would be so tough that I don't even now if they'd be around to come to the table.” He continued, “I would take away their wealth. I would take away the oil. What you should be doing now is taking away the oil.”

In explaining what would happen after he “bombed the hell out of the oil fields,” Trump said “I'd then get Exxon, I'd then get these great oil companies to go in—they would rebuild them so fast your head will spin . . .”
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Hillary is all for intervening when the adversary is some geriatric dictator whose worst days are behind him but with a fledgling, vigorous, and robust terror threat in ISIS, Hillary is backing away from
the conflict. During the Democratic primaries, she said, “In terms of thousands of combat troops, like some on the Republican side are recommending, I think that should be a non-starter.” Hillary warned, “I don't think it's the smartest way to go after ISIS. I think it gives ISIS a new recruitment tool.”
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She says that sending ground troops to battle them is “exactly what ISIS wants. They've advertised that. They want American troops back in the Middle East. They want American soldiers on the ground fighting them.”
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Once again, Hillary is showing her gullibility. While ISIS may brag, boast, and say, in effect, “bring it on,” they will actually welcome US troops about as much as a boxer would welcome Mohammed Ali climbing into the ring to fight him.

The contrast between George W. Bush's obsessive focus on fighting terrorism and Obama's dismissal of ISIS as “the junior varsity” could not be more obvious. And disparate results flow from that contrast. During the Bush administration, after 9/11 only three Americans were killed within our borders by terrorists. Under Obama and Hillary, 42 Americans have been killed on our soil (through December 10, 2015).

Terrorism is the legacy of the Obama/Hillary foreign policy. The entire election will be a referendum on their policy and its obvious failure. Nor will the terror issue fade. Unfortunately, it will remain front and center. ISIS will keep it there. Hillary's candidacy is, literally, hostage to each demented terrorist who kills innocents in hope of a reward in heaven. Each attack diminishes her credibility and makes terrorism, her weakest suit, the central issue. Why will Hillary lose? Terrorism, stupid.

The breeding ground for anti-Western sentiment in the Arab world is the West Bank and the Gaza Strip where millions of Palestinians live in self-imposed exile in refugee camps, thinking of little but eventually returning to Israel and taking back the land they abandoned 70 years ago.

Because the United States and Europe have largely sided with Israel, the Arab street has been violently anti-American and creates thousands of would-be terrorists every year. Their animosity toward the United States and Europe is odd given the massive amount of aid the West gives the Palestinian Authority each year.

International Aid to Palestinian Authority, 2013
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In all, the world gave the Palestinian Authority $1.1 billion in 2013. With a population of 4.7 million, the aid comes to $234 per person, per year. For a family of four or five or six, this amounts to a princely subsidy, if ever the people could see the money before the Palestinian Authority steals it.

Obama and Hillary have sought to appease Arab anger over the West Bank by justifying their complaints and drawing a parallel between Palestinian terrorism, which murders innocents, and Israel's construction of homes for Jews in the region. Every time a terror attack kills Israelis—and often Americans too—Obama and Hillary
say that Israel shared part of the blame because it enraged the Arabs by helping Jewish settlers build homes on the West Bank. This rationale ignores completely the fact that the real epicenter of Palestinian terror is Gaza, where, in 2005, Israel pursued the very policy Obama and Hillary want them to adopt on the West Bank. Back then, Israel forced the Jewish settlements to close down and pulled out all of its troops. But the withdrawal didn't stop the terror attacks on Israel. It just gave the terrorists a new base from which to operate.

Obama and Hillary have given the Arab terrorists what they lack and so desperately seek: legitimacy for their hateful anti-Semitic point of view. At the State Department, Hillary urged a so-called two-state solution (Israeli and Palestinian) based on the pre-1967 war borders of Israel. Those borders left Israel with a waist of only nine miles, a border Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “indefensible,” noting that it left Israel with a width that was only “half the width of the Washington Beltway.” He added, “These were not the boundaries of peace; they were the boundaries of repeated wars, because the attack on Israel was so attractive.”
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