Category: Terror War

The Guardian reports that François Hollande will ask Obama to get serious about attacking ISIS in Syria and Iraq when they meet next week. According to a “European diplomat”, Hollande believes that US’ attacks on ISIS aren’t as successful as the Obama administration would have us believe and that lack of success is destabilizing Europe. This is where I remind my readers, once again, that Hollande’s first act as president of France was to announce the early withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan – the fulfillment of his campaign promise to get France out of the war against terror – much like Obama’s campaign promise to get US troops out of Iraq.

Noting the debate raging among governments over how to handle the biggest movement of people to Europe since the second world war, he added: “It’s the foreign fighters but it’s also the migrants crisis which is dividing the Europeans, destabilising the continent, so we have to act quickly, telling the US administration the core interests of the Europeans, your best allies, are at stake.”

Funny how a scant months ago everyone was telling us how there was no military solution to the problems in the middle east, that the diplomats would have to solve it, you know, so we didn’t need a large military intervention in Iraq and Syria, but now, suddenly, the diplomats are calling for more military action.

Because the West squandered their opportunities to solve the Syrian civil war years ago, no matter what happens there now, it will end in a blood bath. And, the Europeans are calling for US troops to be in that blood bath, without any offer of their own military beyond some airstrikes, for their own political benefit.

While I stand with France against terrorism, they need to step up for themselves, too.

According to Fox News, French prosecutors report that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the fellow who planned the Paris terrorist attack last week, was among the terrorists killed yesterday in law enforcement raids.

Abaaoud had claimed he successfully moved back and forth from Europe to Syria coordinating terror attacks, and narrowly escaped a January police raid in the Belgian city of Verviers. “Allah blinded their vision and I was able to leave… despite being chased after by so many intelligence agencies,” he told the ISIS magazine Dabiq.

Police say they launched Wednesday’s operation after receiving information from tapped phone calls, surveillance and tipoffs suggesting that Abaaoud was holed up in the apartment. Eight other people were arrested.

I have to think that there was some sort of intelligence on the fellow from before the raid. Just like the intelligence that the French used in their bombing raids against ISIS days after the attack. Obviously, law enforcement knows who and where these people are, but law enforcement can only do something after the attack, whereas the military can do something about them before hand, while they’re still in training in the ISIS hinterlands. Abaaoud traveled freely to Syria for his training and no one did anything. Until it was too late.

The other day, the President seemed emotional during his talk with the media when he mentioned his meetings with wounded troops at Walter as an excuse for his inaction in the war against terror, or whatever the Left is calling it these days. From the New York Times;

The president has deployed more than 3,000 U.S. troops to Iraq to assist local security forces, and he recently announced plans to send 50 special operations forces to Syria. But he’s vowed to avoid the kind of large-scale ground combat that U.S. troops engaged in for years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama appeared emotional as he spoke of the consequences of war, referencing the injured troops he visits at Walter Reed, a military hospital near the White House.

“Some of those are people I’ve ordered into battle,” he said.

He said the U.S. would have to be prepared for a permanent occupation in Syria or Iraq if he sent in ground forces.

“What happens when there’s a terrorist attack generated from Yemen?” Obama asked. “Do we then send more troops into there? Or Libya, perhaps? Or if there’s a terrorist network that’s operating anywhere else — in North Africa, or in Southeast Asia?”

From another New York Times link;

“Some of them seem to think that if I was just more bellicose in expressing what we’re doing, that that would make a difference,” he said. “Because that seems to be the only thing that they’re doing, is talking as if they’re tough.” In a subdued tone, he attributed his reluctance to the costs of war. “Maybe part of the reason is because every few months I go to Walter Reed,” he said, referring to the military hospital near Washington. “And I see a 25-year-old kid that is paralyzed or has lost his limbs. And some of those are people I’ve ordered into battle.”

Yeah, well, that all rings pretty hollow to those of us who have watched this administration dismantle the defense structure in this country. They want to ground the A-10 Thunderbolt, the most effective umbrella of protection for the troops on the ground. He doesn’t want to pay the troops what they’re worth and then he wants to hike their healthcare costs when they can’t serve any longer. Th Navy doesn’t have the ships they need to project what little power the Defense Department has left to trouble spots. His Office of Personnel Management has dumped the personal information of 25 million Americans, most of them members of the defense community, on Chinese hackers. All of the government’s cost saving measures are resting squarely on the backs of those who serve or those who have served in the military.

Now, when asked how he’ll respond to the global terror threat, he suddenly cares about the people that he needs to send into battle to make the country safe.

Early this morning, French authorities raided an apartment looking for Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the mastermind of the attack last week in Paris. According to Fox News, two terrorists were killed and seven arrested. One of the dead was a woman, supposedly Abaaoud’s cousin, with a suicide vest who detonated herself and took out a police dog in the process. Five French police officers were slightly injured in the hour-long gun battle.

Police vans and fire trucks rushed to the scene north of Paris, just over a mile from the Stade de France stadium, which was targeted by three suicide bombers during Friday’s attacks. Riot police cleared people from the streets, pointing guns at curious residents to move them off the roads.

Residents said an initial explosion shook the neighborhood at about 4 a.m. (10 p.m. EST).

“Then there was second big explosion. Then two more explosions. There was an hour of gunfire,” said Baptiste Marie, a 26-year-old independent journalist who lives in the neighborhood.

While the raid was happening, French President Francois Hollande was talking to the country’s mayors about all of the things that he was doing to make his country safe from terrorists. Of course, Hollande ran for President on the promise that he’d get France out of the war against terror, and his first act in office was to announce the early withdrawal of French forces from Afghanistan. You know, just like Obama promised to withdraw from Iraq during his presidential campaign in 2008. You could call their current situation karma or irony, except that both were totally predictable.

The Wall Street Journal reports that France now wants some sort of Grand Alliance with the US and Russia, but I think it’s not in the cards at this point. All three have frittered away the opportunity to end the Syrian civil war, which is at the root of the existence of ISIS, lest we forget. France and the US want Assad out, while Russia is hoping to keep him on his throne.

In related news, two Air France flights from the US to France were diverted due to bomb threats. Neither bomb threat turned out to be true, however.

According to The Hill, Senator Ted Cruz says that he’ll introduce legislation to prevent the President from importing refugees to the United States calling it “lunacy” in light of the attacks last week in Paris;

Asked what would have happened if his own father — a Cuban refugee who fled the island’s repressive Communist regime — had been told all those years ago by political leaders that there was no place for him because of security risks, Cruz said it was a different situation.

“See that’s why it’s important to define what it is we’re fighting,” Cruz said.

“If my father were part of a theocratic and political movement like radical Islamism, that promotes murdering anyone who doesn’t share your extreme faith, or forcibly converting them, then it would make perfect sense.”

Um, yeah. It seems that the president would arrive at the same conclusion without guidance from Senator Cruz, you know, because it’s the president’s job. But, of course, this is more of that smart diplomacy, image-building bullshit that has made us a laughing stock on the world stage. I don’t see any of the wealthy Gulf States stepping up to take in refugees.

Of course, Cruz’ threat of legislation is largely symbolic because if he could get it through the House and the Senate, the President would veto anything that stands in his way to prop up his legacy.

Even Democrat governor of New Hampshire, Maggie Hassan has urged the president to proceed with more caution, according to the Union Leader;

Gov. Maggie Hassan said the federal government should “halt acceptance” of Syrian refugees until U.S. authorities can assure the vetting process keeps Americans safe.

[…]

Hassan spokesman Monday morning said the governor “has always made clear that we must ensure robust refugee screening to protect American citizens, and believes that we must know more of the facts about those who carried out the Paris terrorist attacks and have strong assurances of safety from our intelligence officials before we admit refugees from Syria into the United States.”

How’s this for a solution – we just allow those women and children that the media likes to portray as the majority of the refugees, and we block the importation of military-aged men…let Germany take them.

Bobo sends us a link to an article about those strikes this last weekend that we talked about yesterday where the US airstrikes, mainly A-10 Warthogs and AC-130 gunships, targeted ISIS fuel trucks. According to this article, this is a brand new strategy;

Targeting fuel trucks used to be off limits because of the civilians operating them, but shortly after the Paris terrorist attacks the rules of engagement changed. Before destroying the tankers the USAF, using F-15s, dropped information leaflets telling the drivers to scatter as an attack was imminent. To show the drivers that USAF was serious they had A-10’s conduct strafing runs close to the trucks an hour before the strikes.

Yeah, well, that’s very civilized of us. Unfortunately, being civilized and announcing our targets to the bad guys and firing warning shots isn’t going to turn out well for our pilots. I can’t imagine that ISIS will be announcing to the public where their suicide bombers will strike anytime soon. Taking out fuel trucks aren’t that important, compared to killing people so they can’t support ISIS. Those truck drivers are as much our enemies as the fellows with MANPADS anti-aircraft weapons who will be firing at those A-10s and C-130s the next time they make one of their “warning shots” runs. If those air strikes are going to be successful, they have to make working for ISIS unattractive to those truck drivers. Not just the ones on the job, but also any who might be contemplating the work.

We’re doing this war against terrorists while trying to be good guys about war. There is no such thing as “good guys” in war, well, good guys finish last in war. The strategy against ISIS is failing and this Nobel peace prize president is just trying to pass off the hard decisions to the next guy. In the meantime, ISIS is growing stronger and more devious. Those fuel trucks should have been destroyed in the opening days of the war against ISIS if they were ever legitimate targets and the fact that the media thinks it was some sort of coup just proves that they’re in the bag for this administration, if there was ever any doubt.

Lars Taylor sends us a link from Reuters which reports that the Russians and French hit targets near Raqqa;

A French government source said Russia, which until this week has mostly been striking Western-backed groups fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, had also hit IS targets in Raqqa on Tuesday.

The action, which was not immediately confirmed by Moscow, came hours after the Russian Federal Security Service confirmed that a bomb had exploded a Russian tourist airliner over Egypt’s Sinai peninsula last month and President Vladimir Putin vowed retribution. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Sinai bombing as well as the Paris attacks.

Again, why weren’t these targets hit before the attacks on Paris and on a Russian airliner? Why has this war become a “thrust and parry” series of events? Whatever happened to “audacity”? But, at least the fuel truck drivers are all safe.

According to the Huffington Post, the governors of Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi and Texas have said that they will not participate in the program of refugee resettlement in the Federal government’s plan to bring 65,000 to this country from the Middle East;

All of the governors cited the terrorist attacks in Paris, which the Islamic State, also called ISIS or Daesh, claimed credit for. Authorities found a Syrian passport near one of the suicide bombers there, although it has yet to be confirmed whether it belonged to the attacker, or whether it was stolen or a forgery. French authorities said the mastermind of the attacks was a Belgian man.

The attacks set off a backlash against Syrian refugees. In Europe, Poland’s future minister for European affairs said the country will not implement the European Union’s refugee plan in light of the attacks in Paris. In the U.S., calls to limit refugee admissions have come mostly from Republicans — many of whom had expressed concerns about admitting Muslims from Syria in the first place.

Obviously, those governors remember the example of Governor William Jefferson Clinton and the Mariel boatlift Cuban refugees in 1980. As many as 125,000 Cubans made their way to the US and Jimmy Carter put the more untrustworthy refugees at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas where Bill Clinton was the governor until the next election when he suffered defeat directly related to the Cuban refugees in Arkansas.

Of course, losing those Republican governors won’t deter this President, he doesn’t have to worry about reelection. He does, however have to save his legacy defined by his Nobel peace prize – you, know, despite whatever effect it will have on our national security.