The real issue isn’t whether President Obama used the word “terror” the day after the Benghazi terror attack, but whether Obama truly comprehends the Islamist terror threat to America and the West.
It’s not simply that Obama and his team spent so many days denying the obvious — that the Benghazi assault was a long-planned operation by an al Qaeda offshoot — or even that the administration reduced security on the ground in Libya, despite local pleas to increase it.
It’s that the Obama team is still in denial about the resurgence of the threat, which by my count has produced more terror attacks in the United States in the last three years (though fortunately nothing on the scale of 9/11) than in the previous eight.
However often he celebrates “getting” Osama bin Laden, Obama can’t just declare victory in the War on Terror and go home. The problem was never merely bin Laden nor even al Qaeda and its offshoots, such as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
America and the West still face the hostile, aggressive and implacably hateful ideology of radical Islam that is now advancing, not receding, from Libya through Iraq and Syria to Afghanistan and beyond.
The administration early on abandoned terms such as “War on Terror” and “Islamist terror” — phrases that acknowledge that the enemy is more than a single organization, but an ideology that has infected much of the Muslim world, and even some Muslims in America. Obama instead talks of “our battle against al Qaeda.”
Indeed, this administration has blacklisted top security officials and experts who talk straight about radical Islam. From the FBI to the NSA, CIA, Army and Homeland Security, anyone who mentions Islam in a politically incorrect way is risking his or her job. Those who say “jihad” is only a “spiritual journey” get promoted — and then get to leak details of Israeli counter-terror operations or British-Saudi penetration of al Qaeda.
Will our allies ever trust us again with sensitive data? Will intelligence officers risk lives and careers when their superiors sacrifice everything for a headline?
Even killing bin Laden was hardly Obama’s idea, and he was slow to do it. Both his predecessors also sought bin Laden; the circumstances only ripened on Obama’s watch. In fact, Obama & Co. curbed many intelligence programs — like enhanced interrogation — that led to bin Laden. Team Obama also tried to prosecute some of the very interrogators and commandos who did our best counter-terror work.
And he has largely shut down America’s counter-terror human-intelligence program at a time of rising attack
Meanwhile, bin Laden had long since passed on the terror baton to a new generation of terrorists, many raised in the West, that Obama and his aides prefer to call “lone gunmen” or disturbed individuals.
Team Obama ignored, minimized, overlooked or explained away Fort Hood, the attempted bombing over Detroit and the Times Square attack as acts of lone gunmen or deranged individuals.
In fact, the administration’s “blame the video” meme was just the latest iteration of a warped narrative template, wherein Team Obama blames anyone but the terrorists for their terror.
Obama began his term by engaging the murderous regimes in Iran and Syria. Both have repaid this with extremism and blood. Iran has not only sped ahead with its nuclear bomb program, it has accelerated its export of terror while brutalizing dissidents at home.
In his debate, Joe Biden talked of how the United States has been working with Russia and China to curb terror. In fact, Russia and China have been the main enablers of Iran, Syria and North Korea, as they earlier helped cover for atrocities in Sudan.
Meanwhile, the administration largely sat out the “Arab Spring” — leaving forces sympathetic to America without support as Islamists and Iranian pawns fight for control of the nations across the region. In the one exception, Libya, we helped oust a tyrant but have since pulled back — as the reduced security in Benghazi tragically indicates.
In sum, the administration approach is narrowly focused in every sense: It concentrates on short-term political gain rather than long-term counter-terror results, and its greatest casualty is the truth about the terror situation today. It focuses on a few leaves while the forest is beginning to burn as it did before 9/11.
Michael Widlanski’s latest book is “Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat.” A former strategic affairs adviser in Israel’s Ministry of Public Security, he teaches at Bar Ilan University.