iWar

by Bill Gertz

  A third message is that the Russians are moving ahead with the weapon, which will deploy with a nuclear charge estimated to be in the “tens” of megatons—or the equivalent explosive force of tens of millions of tons of TNT. “In this instance we are letting the partners know that it is time for them to stop and begin a constructive dialogue with Russia,” he stated.

  A report produced by a defense consulting firm for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment revealed an even more alarming nuclear weapons program by Moscow: the development of low-yield, precision-guided tactical nuclear weapons that unlike their strategic arms counterparts can be more easily used in future regional conflicts. Instead of city-busting warheads with the nuclear blast equivalent of tens, hundreds, or millions of tons of TNT, Russia is developing nuclear weapons with yields in the range of between 10 tons and 150 tons of TNT for use in regional conflicts Moscow anticipates could break out along Russia’s periphery in the future. “In effect, Russia’s nuclear developments are making the unthinkable thinkable,” the 2010 report said of the prospects for future nuclear conflict.

  The drone submarine is estimated to be around 82 feet in length, with a diameter of around 30 feet, and it will be capable of ranging some 6,200 miles after being dropped from a larger submarine.

  Russia and China together pose the most potent danger to American security through the use of information warfare. The immediate danger, however, comes from the Islamic State terrorist group, which is working to develop similar cyber and information warfare skills.

  The Russian information warfare threat is real and growing and must be countered with a vigorous and well-funded American program designed to expose its operations, murders, and lies.

  6

  ISLAMIC TERROR

  When Jihad Johnny Comes Marching Home

  The struggle with revolutionary Islam will only be won when the West begins to methodically analyze the ideological religion that empowers it and forms its basis.

  —STEPHEN P. LAMBERT, “THE SOURCES OF ISLAMIC REVOLUTIONARY CONDUCT,” 2005

  Pakistan-born Tashfeen Malik opened the top of her laptop computer inside the Redlands, California, home where she and her husband lived. It was December 2, 2015, another typically warm and sunny day in Southern California. Around 8:46 a.m. she began searching social media for documents and videos posted by the Islamic State terrorist group. Less than two hours later, around 11:15, Malik posted this message on her Facebook page: “We pledge allegiance Khalifa bu bkr al bhaghdadi al quraishi.” It was a public declaration of jihad—or holy war—in support of the Syrian-based Islamic State terror group leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

  Minutes earlier Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, a specialist with the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, had opened fire on a group of some eighty people who had gathered for a training event and Christmas Party for employees of the San Bernardino County Environmental Health Department at a state-run nonprofit center. Farook earlier had stopped by the meeting and left a backpack containing several pipe bombs that he had planned to set off during his attack.

  Around 11 a.m., Malik and Farook, dressed in all black to hide their identities, burst through the door of the center firing AR-15 semiautomatic rifles. After more than one hundred rounds were fired, fourteen people were dead and twenty-two others wounded.

  Several people ran for a door in the large room and another person screamed “Get down!” while others, frozen in terror, just stood there. Survivors initially thought the attack was a training exercise but then realized what was happening and fled the scene.

  According to a Justice Department report issued months after the attack, “As the chaos unfolded, a round hit a fire sprinkler pipe causing water to pour out of the ceiling. The water and smoke that filled the room made it difficult for people to see. The shooters walked between tables. If someone moved or made a sound, the shooters fired one or multiple shots into their body.”

  Many of the high-velocity .223-caliber bullets passed through the conference room walls, striking one woman, and another woman was shot as she tried to escape through a glass door. The bodies of two people were lying outside the room—the first people killed as the terrorists arrived at the building.

  “It was the worst thing imaginable,” one police officer who arrived at the scene recalled. “Some people were quiet, hiding, others were screaming or dying, grabbing at your legs because they wanted us to get them out, but our job at the moment was to keep going. That was the hardest part, stepping over them.”

  The first official response was a tweet by the San Bernardino County sheriff at 11:51 a.m.: “ACTIVE SHOOTER: Area of Orange Show Rd/Waterman Ave near Park Center, & surrounding area remains VERY ACTIVE. AVOID!”

  The attack lasted four minutes. Most of those killed were shot in the back. Malik and Farook fled in an SUV and a short time later would die in a shoot-out with police.

  Neighbors interviewed by local media in the aftermath of the shooting revealed that fears of a possible terrorist plot were not reported to authorities. A group of Middle Easterners seen at the couple’s house was not reported over fears the informants would be accused of racial bias by “profiling” the potential terrorists, and fears of being labeled “Islamophobic.”

  The Justice Department report made no mention that neighbors’ fears of being labeled anti-Muslim as a result of liberal political correctness had hampered law enforcement from discovering the plot to carry out the attack. The omission reveals just how deadly the doctrine of political correctness can be when it comes to dealing with Islamic terrorism.

  Both racial profiling and Islamophobia are targets of liberals and Muslim activists who insist there is no link between terrorism and Islam. Had the suspicions been reported to police or FBI counterterrorism agents, the attack might have been headed off. A search of the couple’s residence prior to the attack would have revealed pipe-bomb-making materials and thousands of rounds of rifle and pistol ammunition that were used in the attack. The pipe bombs either failed to detonate or were not triggered.

  Days later the official Islamic State radio network Al-Bayan hailed Malik and Farook as “soldiers of the caliphate,” the name used for the group’s territory.

  San Bernardino marked the deadliest terror attack on American soil since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon—that is, until six months after San Bernardino, when another American jihadist, Omar Mateen, a twenty-nine-year-old Islamist security guard, killed forty-nine people and wounded fifty-three others in an Orlando nightclub. That massacre also exposed the fact that poor FBI training involving Muslim terrorist suspects could have prevented that attack, since Mateen was investigated not once but twice by the FBI before the deadly shooting.

  • • •

  Americans are dying at the hands of Islamic terrorists in attacks that are increasing both at home and abroad. And American government leaders have refused to take action against the deadly ideas behind the murders as a result of false and politically correct fears that attacking Islamist ideology will fuel religious bigotry against Islam.

  The failure to wage information warfare against the hateful and murderous Islamic ideology of jihad—holy war—has doomed the United States to endless conventional warfare that is both costly and deadly and is being waged with no formula for achieving victory and the peace that comes with it.

  American security is endangered by leftist policies that prohibit recognizing the terror threat, the vital first step in taking action to defeat it.

  Two of the deadliest attacks on Americans could have been stopped before they occurred but for the damaging notion of “Islamophobia”—leftist code for religious bias against Muslims—which prevented authorities from disrupting the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando.

  • • •

  The root cause of these failures can be traced to June 4, 2009. On that date, President Barack Obama made an extraordinary speech that at the time appeared
to be of little consequence. But the remarks would shake the foundations of Middle East stability and ultimately lead to the emergence of perhaps the deadliest Islamic terrorist group in the modern era: the Islamic State. On that date in Cairo, the American president spoke before an audience at Al-Azhar University and blamed the United States for the poor relations between the West and Muslim-dominated North Africa and the Middle East. The president had come into office only six months earlier with little foreign policy experience and harboring a worldview shaped by associations with the radical politics of the 1960s and ’70s, when the New Left radicals promised a Chinese communist–style Long March through the institutions of America in a revolutionary Marxist coup d’état. In Cairo, Obama claimed falsely that the terrorist attacks in 2001 on New York and Washington “led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries but also to human rights.” Never before in history had an American president traveled abroad and attacked his own country and people in such a fashion. In effect, the president was tarring Americans as racists and religious bigots opposed to radical Islam out of ignorance and prejudice. For the president, the 9/11 attacks that killed three thousand innocent people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and on United Airlines Flight 93 triggered an American backlash against Islam that “led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals.”

  The comments were fundamentally false, as there was no anti-Muslim backlash after the 9/11 terror and Muslims continue to be protected, along with followers of other faiths, under American principles of religious freedom.

  What has come to be called Obama’s apology speech was the first item on the president’s liberal left agenda; Obama called for a new beginning between America and Muslims around the world, based on mutual interest and respect. He insisted that “America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.” Throughout history, he said, Islam has featured both religious tolerance and racial equality. Vowing to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam, the speech set in motion a series of disastrous U.S. government policies. “We are taking concrete actions to change course,” Obama proclaimed in what was surely a presidential understatement.

  Within a few short years of the Cairo speech, the president’s misguided liberal left policies and a commitment to making the United States liked by the Muslim world had produced the most destructive period of instability since the administration of President Jimmy Carter, whose own misguided policies facilitated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and in that same year, 1979, the fall of the shah of Iran, an American ally, and the takeover of that key Middle East state by hostile Islamic theocrats.

  Within a decade of Obama’s one-sided nuclear deal, Tehran will be free to develop nuclear weapons that can be used by the Islamist regime to carry out its threat against Israel, America’s key ally in the Middle East. Iran has vowed to wipe Israel off the earth. The disasters of the Carter administration show that liberal political idealism and utopianism are no substitute for global American leadership, and that the consequences of failed policies can be destructive, long-lasting, and deadly.

  From an information warfare standpoint, Obama failed from the outset of his presidency at one of the most fundamental duties of a commander in chief: knowing your enemy. The president has misunderstood the nature of the Islamist forces arrayed against both the United States and the West in general. By sympathizing with Islam and misunderstanding its key tenets, Obama forced his administration into ideological disarmament that limited all descriptions of Islamist foes by mandating the use of a vaguely defined term for Islamic terrorism, “violent extremism.” His worldview was derived from resentment-based concepts espoused in Marxist dogma that assert that America is not a great or even good nation but a racialist and imperialist power that must be brought to heel through liberal left policies. The president utterly failed to understand the ideology of Islamism—the political form of religious Islam that combines elements of fascism, Marxist historical resentment, and a supremacist view of inevitable Islamic world domination under fundamentalist principles dating back centuries. As a result, the president has doomed Americans to endless war.

  The current battle against Islamist terror forces can be compared in some ways to the immoral foreign policies that for decades dominated American foreign policy during the Cold War. By treating the struggle between the Soviet Union and its global satellites on the one hand and the U.S.-led free world on the other with a kind of moral equivalence between the two competing systems, the United States facilitated Soviet oppression and continued rule.

  It took President Ronald Reagan to produce the kind of moral clarity that was needed to bring about the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. So too with the worldwide Islamist danger: unless its evil supremacist ideology is effectively countered, there will be no similar victory.

  In essence, Obama’s policies provide a case study in how not to fight and defeat Islamic terrorism through information warfare. The result is a Middle East in tatters, with hundreds of thousands of people dead, and an expanding force of ideologically motivated Islamists gaining both followers and territory at an alarming rate.

  For his first term and most of the second, the president kept the country in the dark about the fundamental change in course he had initiated in American foreign and security policies. The lone exception was his plan to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where al Qaeda terrorists captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere had been taken, some of them harshly interrogated. Obama and his advisers falsely believed the prison was the main recruiting tool for al Qaeda and other terrorists. But that view was mistaken, part of a calculated program of jihadist propaganda designed to fool international publics into opposing the United States. For jihadists—holy warriors following the tenets of Islam—imprisoning enemies and beheading and torturing them is an accepted practice. Only the misguided liberal infidels of the West, they argued, failed to exploit their enemies.

  In 2016, the president finally tipped his hand regarding his prejudiced views. In a revealing interview with the Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama for the first time helped place into context why he and his administration were so feckless in dealing with the problem of Islamic State terrorism, which in 2016 was rapidly spreading from central power bases in Syria and Iraq to the United States and Europe in the West, to Afghanistan, Egypt, North Africa, and as far away as Southeast Asia. The tens of thousands of refugees flooding into Europe from the Middle East carnage spawned new networks for terrorist attacks like those in Paris and Brussels.

  The headline on the White House–sanctioned Atlantic article was “The Obama Doctrine.” It distilled the president’s policies down to the bumper-sticker mantra of “Don’t do stupid shit.” It was not really a doctrine but an antidoctrine, based primarily on opposition to President George W. Bush’s ill-fated 2003 invasion of Iraq. Obama had exploited the failure to create a stable Iraq into his own ideology. The article revealed that the president disdained the Washington foreign policy and national security establishment, which he claimed had scripted a “Washington playbook” that he opposed. And Obama dismissed the notion that maintaining the credibility of American power around the world as a force for keeping the peace mattered at all, whether in Syria or elsewhere. For Obama and his advisers, there was in effect a policy of “Don’t do anything that risked the use of force,” and adamant opposition to any action that might remotely lead to war with Muslim countries. The president expressed resentment toward American military leaders who had given him advice on what to do militarily in places like Syria. He first threatened to strike the Bashar Assad government in Damascus if they used chemical weapons; it was a strategic red line, the crossing of which would require U.S. action. But after announcing plans for military strikes using standoff missiles and bombers, the weak president never followed through with the threat. Since then, the Islamic State cancer centered in Syria has continued to metastasize.

  As
Obama explained, the resistance to using military force was a crowning achievement of his presidency. As he told the Atlantic:

  Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power. That is the source of the controversy. There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don’t follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply.

  Goldberg described Obama’s 2013 decision not to bomb Syria as a landmark in preventing the United States “from entering yet another disastrous Muslim civil war.” But that conclusion badly missed the most important point: Obama never understood that the key to defeating the growing threat of Islamic terrorism is the use of information warfare tools to discredit and defeat the ideology of radical Islamic jihad. This was a fact he could never bring himself or his administration to admit because he was so wedded to misguided notions both about America and the nature of the threat posed by radical Islam. For Obama, the questionable and scientifically unproven notion of man-made climate change posed a bigger threat than the spread of the Islamic State from Syria and Iraq into Libya, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and ultimately Europe and the United States.