What keeps us safe?

Why has the Obama team consistently denied the dangers of radical Islam? Victor Davis Hanson writes about

an ongoing administration campaign of euphemisms among copycat bureaucrats, from “workplace violence” to “overseas contingency operations.” We see this again in the administration’s fashionable collective denial that the Islamic State has anything to do with Islam — as if foreign tourists visited Mecca as freely as they do the Vatican; as if Muslim apostates picked and chose their new religions as easily and safely as do Protestants; as if beheadings and stonings were as frequent in Paris and Houston as they are in Riyadh and Teheran; as if Bibles were brought into Iran and Saudi Arabia as freely as Korans are into America; as if churches sprouted up in Turkey, Iran, and Gaza as do mosques in Britain and Michigan; and as if women and gays were as equal in the Middle East as they are in the West.

Hillary Clinton is all but running for president, boasting about her reset diplomacy while secretary of state during Obama’s first term. But it is hard to find a single example of inspired diplomacy during her tenure. Canceling missile-defense cooperation with the Czechs and Poles while resetting relations with Vladimir Putin was not wise. Nor was leading from behind in Libya (“We came, we saw, and he died”). Nor was her emphasis on climate change as a global threat or her pressure on Israel to grant concessions supposedly to ensure Middle East peace. Nor was welcoming the election of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Nor was ignoring requests for beefed-up security at the consulate in Benghazi. Nor was claiming that the deaths of the four Americans in Benghazi were due to a spontaneous riot over a video (“What difference at this point does it make?”). Nor was pulling all troops out of Iraq. Nor was lifting the embargos and trade sanctions against Iran. Nor was much of anything except an impressive near million miles of traveling while secretary, an astonishing feat for someone in her sixties and often in poor health.

What then keeps us safe? Three considerations alone.

First, for all the convenient trashing of the Bush-Cheney protocols, so far the Obama administration has quietly kept most of them. It tried to square the circle of embracing what it once denounced by creating euphemisms and politically correct banalities while the drones bombed on, the renditions kept occurring, and the NSA stepped up its spying.

Second, the U.S. military, despite massive cuts and efforts to force on it proper politically correct mentalities, is still preeminent. Just as it had broken the back of the insurgencies in Iraq by 2009 and killed thousands of would-be global terrorists who flocked to Anbar Province, so too, if it is unleashed, it can probably destroy the Islamic State.

Third, so far we have been very lucky, and yet we are not out of the woods. The underwear bomber easily could have blown up nearly 300 Americans and paralyzed air travel for months. The Tsarnaev brothers could have dropped off more backpack bombs in Boston and tripled the number of casualties. Iran is probably accelerating its efforts to get a bomb before Obama leaves office. We still have no strategy to stop the onslaught of the Islamic State. Putin may soon invade a NATO-member Baltic State — just to see what the United States is going to do about it.

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