by Bill Gertz
“ISIS is not an existential threat to the United States,” Obama said. “Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it,” he added in the next breath. Designating the notion of climate change as a world threat has been dubbed the “church of climatology,” since there is a dearth of honest scientific study. Climate change is yet another liberal shibboleth in the Left’s panoply of tools seeking more centralized political power. Yet in the same conversation with Goldberg, the president described himself as a foreign policy “realist” who believes he cannot relieve all the world’s misery and noted that choices were required where they “can make a real impact.”
The president also made clear he is opposed to American leadership, whether in regard to jihadist terror, Russian expansionism, or Chinese communist hegemonism. Obama instead favors what one of his aides termed “leading from behind,” a policy first enunciated with disastrous effect during Obama’s reluctant foray into foreign military intervention when he ordered U.S. military forces to aid rebels fighting Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi.
The Libyan intervention would prove to be nearly as dangerous as Bush’s intervention in Iraq, and that danger continues to increase. Gadhafi, who had ordered the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing all 243 people on board and 16 crew members, and who was never held accountable, would be killed and his body dragged through the streets of the coastal Libyan city of Sirte during the Libyan revolution.
The intervention left bands of marauding militias to rule the country and turned an oil-rich state into a failed Islamist redoubt. “Libya has become a terrorist safe haven,” an American counterterrorism official told me. So much for leading from behind.
The one area where Obama was not averse to the use of force was in ordering attacks by armed drones. This single weapon has proved so powerful and effective that it has forced terrorists around the world to completely alter the way they operate, requiring them and their security minders to listen intently for the telltale hum of hovering unmanned aerial vehicles—the deadly signature of Predator and Reaper drones, which deliver deadly accurate guided missiles against cars or houses.
Yet this tool too had been restricted under Obama as a result of pressure from international human rights groups and others who lobbied against use of the weapon as unfair to the terrorists and because the strikes caused too much collateral damage—mainly because terrorist leaders began surrounding themselves with women, children, and captured prisoners to dissuade the drone targeters and operators and their commanders from striking.
Obama ordered a sharp curtailment in drone strikes, like those planned against Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi several times in 2015 and 2016 but never carried out, over concerns about killing civilians close to the terrorist leader. Baghdadi had been spotted in the open at least three times at or near his headquarters in Raqqa, Syria. Under Obama’s orders, the CIA and U.S. military, which operate the armed drones, must first meet strict rules of engagement that limit causing civilian and collateral damage, and require confirmation that the target is located in a specific strike zone. The curtailment highlighted the failure of the president and his administration to understand that warfare must be waged with a specific strategic objective—defeating the enemy, ending in victory, and producing peace.
Drone strikes have been the central element of the president’s counterterrorism policy since he took office in 2009. And they are a fundamental reason his counterterrorism policies have failed. Obama claims to harbor no illusions about radical Islam but his worldview was poisoned by his bias against America and the outdated and false notion that America is a colonialist, imperialist power rooted in the evil of slavery.
The key failure was his unwillingness to use information warfare tools and techniques to attack the ideological underpinnings of Islam’s tenet of jihadism, which permits killing to advance the cause of Islamic supremacy. As shown, the president was more concerned about stoking anti-Muslim xenophobia among what he regarded as racist Americans by the use of any type of counter-jihad ideological warfare campaign.
During his 2012 reelection bid, Obama’s central campaign theme was that “a new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.” But as the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack on two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya—a CIA base and U.S. diplomatic compound—would show, the narrative of a declining al Qaeda was totally false. A terrorist group linked to al Qaeda, Ansar al Sharia, launched a deadly, military-style assault on the compound and a nearby CIA facility that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens. The others were Foreign Service officer Sean Smith and CIA contractors Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty. To protect his political fortunes, aides to the leftist former community organizer from Chicago floated false and deceptive stories that the attack was really the result of an anti-Islamic video—a meme that again bolstered Obama’s false propaganda narrative against America.
Fears of anti-American bias and worries of fueling anti-Muslim sentiment prevented the president and the rest of the American government from adopting an effective strategy. And this key failure is a central reason Obama will be remembered most for his failed foreign policies. Throughout his presidency, Obama adamantly refused to apply an effective counter-ideological warfare approach to, first, al Qaeda, and then its ultraviolent successor, the Islamic State. In Obama’s worldview, globalization made notions of American national interest outdated. The liberal cosmopolitan leader has turned the twentieth-century precept that nations do not have friends, only interests, on its head. For Obama, the world should be friends and transcend all concept of nationalism. The exception was the policy for dealing with transnational terrorists. And here the president and his advisers refused to address the religious ideology behind Islamic extremism, because of a postmodern liberal left philosophical bias that argues the concept of religious truth should be rejected as outdated. In its place leftists now advocate a radicalized moral relativism and individualism that are applied to all spheres of human existence. Instead of tackling the difficult task of waging ideological war against the Islamist ideology, Obama favored the policy of killing terrorist leaders as the primary means of addressing the problem, a strategy that harked back to the Vietnam War, when news reporters attended daily briefings dubbed the “five o’clock follies” on the roof of a Saigon hotel, where military spokesmen would give out the latest body count of Viet Cong insurgents killed in battle by U.S. forces.
The war on Islamic terror that began after the 9/11 attacks has been based completely on the mistaken idea that killing terrorist leaders is akin to cutting off the head of a snake and causing the rest of the body to die. Both the George W. Bush administration and the Obama administration frequently touted statistics on the deaths of al Qaeda and later Islamic State leaders as signs of progress against the enemy. Bush liked to say that 75 percent of al Qaeda leaders had been killed or captured. By 2011, Obama was using the same questionable statistics, albeit slightly modified by the fact that the United States was no longer capturing enemy combatants, as a result of his opposition to Guantanamo detentions and interrogations.
By 2015, Obama boasted that drone strikes and special operations commando raids had killed twenty-two of the top thirty al Qaeda leaders, or 73 percent, including Osama bin Laden. “How many times do 75 percent of al Qaeda’s top leaders need to be killed before the terror group is dead?” remarked Bill Roggio, editor of the online Long War Journal.
The flaw of the snake-head approach completely misunderstands the persistence and nature of an ideologically armed jihadist enemy that is driven to killing not by its radical Islamist leaders, who are quickly replaced once removed from the battlefield, but by the greater appeal of a death-cult-like Muslim ideology that feeds on the resentments of Muslims going back over one thousand years.
The jihadists have adopted sophisticated information warfare techniques to promote their ideological cause and recruit suicide bombers and others willing to die in promoting their cause. The terrorists’ apocalyptic jihadist ideology argues that of the three monotheist religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Islam is the historically ordained successor to both Christianity and Judaism, simply based on the belief that Muhammad, who lived from AD 537 to 632, was the most recent central figure in the three faiths’ religious history.
The train pulling the Obama counterterrorism strategy went off the rails in 2011, when the president outlined a key element of his strategy against al Qaeda in a secret directive called Presidential Study Directive–11, or PSD-11. An American official familiar with the still-secret directive told me the order was used as the basis for the administration’s support of the international Islamic extremist group known as the Muslim Brotherhood, which advocates what has been labeled a “pre-violent” iteration of same jihadist revolutionary creed in use by the Islamic State and al Qaeda. The ultimate goal is the imposition of fundamentalist Islamic religious and political systems worldwide under sharia law, the totalitarian legal creed followed by terrorists and fundamentalist Muslims.
Backing the Muslim Brotherhood was an utter failure of American information warfare efforts against terrorism. The idea behind PSD-11 was for the Obama administration to support the Muslim Brotherhood as a nonviolent alternative to al Qaeda. The policy met with a disastrous end in Egypt, where Obama repeated the mistake of Jimmy Carter in Iran by misunderstanding the nature of the opposition movement opposing the authoritarian regime of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, a longtime Middle East ally. As the Arab Spring demonstrations resulted in mass protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Obama failed to support prodemocracy protests and instead gave American support to the better-organized and ideologically committed Muslim Brotherhood as the successor regime. Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi was elected in the aftermath and had quietly begun consolidating power and preparing for the imposition of sharia law and other extreme Islamist policies when the Egyptian military ousted him in July 2013. The move came after protesters took to the streets again to oppose the effort to end traditional rule of law. Then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton revealed how naïve and uninformed she was about the antidemocratic nature of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt under Morsi during a meeting with the Egyptian leader in July 2012 in Cairo. Secret State Department talking points for the meeting, released under the Freedom of Information Act, note that Clinton planned to tell Morsi that “We stand behind Egypt’s transition to democracy,” and that “we are ready to work with you.” She also offered Morsi covert police assistance to help keep him in power.
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Since the events of Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has been labeled a terrorist organization by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates—but not the United States, an indication that the dangerous PSD-11 remained in force at the end of the Obama administration. The UAE government went further and labeled two American groups they viewed as affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society, as terrorist groups. Both groups denied they are either Brotherhood outlets or otherwise terrorist organizations. Islamism gained ground in Turkey, a NATO ally, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who moved the country from a secular, Western-oriented democracy toward the budding Islamist state it has become. The failed military coup against Erdogan in July 2016 triggered an acceleration of the Islamicization process by Erdogan. Civil liberties were curtailed and non-Islamic opposition figures were repressed in its aftermath.
“This dangerous foreign policy was launched by PSD-11 and the administration’s open embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood, and now we can see its catastrophic effect,” counterterrorism analyst Patrick Poole told me. The Center for Security Policy has documented Muslim Brotherhood subversion efforts, both in the United States and abroad, including several Brotherhood supporters whom the center has identified as key advisers to Obama. The Obama administration’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood exemplifies a failure to understand the ideologically driven enemy facing the United States in the early decades of the twenty-first century and helped foster the emergence in 2014 of the Islamic State.
The strategy of killing al Qaeda leaders created a major problem. Its new leader after bin Laden, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, joined the Muslim Brotherhood at age fourteen and ended up playing a role in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat. He would go on to found Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which merged with al Qaeda in 1998. By 2009, he would become al Qaeda’s chief operational and strategic commander and in 2011 the overall leader of the terrorist group. Unlike bin Laden, Zawahiri lacked the appeal of his deceased predecessor, which led to divisions within the various chapters, most notably the Iraqi affiliate group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. It would differentiate itself by becoming a full-fledged insurgent group—not just a shadowy terrorist organization like al Qaeda.
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The starting point of the Islamic State takeover of Iraq, a pivotal event in the rise of the organization, can be traced to the night of July 22, 2013. On that date, dozens of gunmen armed with assault rifles, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades made a surprise attack on two prisons near Baghdad, at Abu Ghraib—notorious in the mid-2000s as the place where U.S. Army soldiers had photographed other soldiers abusing terrorist captives—and a second prison north of the capital, called Taji. The Iraqi government was slow to respond to the attacks, which prompted uprisings at both prisons and led to the release of some five hundred prisoners, half of them known to be hardened al Qaeda terrorists and key leaders. The prison break was carried out by al Qaeda, operating under the Islamic principle espoused by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the eighteenth-century Muslim behind the current Islamic supremacist movement promoted by Saudi Arabia called Wahhabism. Wahhab taught that Muslims had a responsibility to recover their prisoners from captivity. And at Abu Ghraib and Taji that is what they did, to great effect. The approximately two hundred jihadists freed from the prisons represented the first and second generation of the Islamic State in Iraq, headed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who began rebuilding IS in 2010 and merged his group with a Syrian branch to become the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in April 2013. The group, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, orchestrated the July 2013 prison break.
Less than a year later, on June 6, 2014, Baghdadi’s forces, numbering some 1,500 fighters, equipped with pickup trucks and machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades and utilizing suicide car bombs, attacked Mosul, a city in northern Iraq that is the country’s second largest. Despite outnumbering the ISIL fighters 15 to 1, two entire Iraqi military divisions, about 30,000 troops, simply fled the city rather than fight against the ISIL forces. It was a stunning victory for the terrorists. The fleeing Iraqis shed all their equipment, including artillery, tanks, armored vehicles, and tons of other weapons, which was quickly integrated into the lightly armed terrorist group’s forces. Two more prisons in Mosul that held hundreds of ISIL terrorists were attacked by the advancing ISIL insurgents, which freed at least 1,200 additional fighters.
The takeover was followed by a bloodbath of gruesome mass killings and executions, filmed and distributed on the Internet and involving thousands of Iraqis. The murderous rampage was unlike any witnessed in modern history and was key propaganda for the group in instilling fear and terror in its enemies. By the end of June 2014, after controlling large sections of Iraqi territory, Baghdadi declared the creation of a caliphate—a region under Islamic control—that aspired to restore the last Muslim caliphate under the Ottoman Empire, which lasted until 1924 and once stretched from Spain through North Africa and as far east as current-day Pakistan and parts of Russia. The group was renamed the Islamic State.
Unlike bin L
aden, who issued directives as an insurgent photographed carrying a signature AK-47 assault rifle, Baghdadi issued his declaration of the caliphate from the Grand Mosque of occupied Mosul, wearing a black turban and black clerical robe. The presentation highlighted key differences between the new Islamic State and al Qaeda. “Where Al Qaeda was primarily a terrorist enterprise and brand, ISIS presents itself first and foremost as a theocratic enterprise, with the goal to reestablish the Caliphate and return all Muslims to a pure form of Islam as it was lived during the time of Mohammed,” counterterrorism experts Sebastian Gorka and Katharine Gorka stated in a report on the group.
Obama, who had undermined American influence in Iraq by withdrawing all U.S. troops by 2011, was slow to react, initially limiting the U.S. government’s response to vapid official pronouncements voicing “concern” for events in Iraq. After realizing the takeover of Mosul and the rise of the Islamic State was a major setback, and under pressure from his military commanders to prevent the complete takeover of Iraq, Obama took to national television and announced he was launching a new counterterrorism strategy. The speech on September 10, 2014, like earlier mutterings, once again included an oft-repeated falsehood asserting the Islamic State was not Islamic. “No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim,” he said. As one U.S. intelligence analyst told me: “The president may be couching terms. Clearly IS fighters are Islamic in prayers, devotion, and ritual. Hundreds to thousands of followers were Islamic before joining IS and there is no evidence of renunciation or apostasy from their earlier Islamic beliefs or practices.” As for the massacres, Obama said that “no religion condones the killing of innocents,” again carefully couching the truth to avoid offending Muslims and attempt to prevent Americans from seeing Islam in a negative light.
As the intelligence analyst explained: