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6 September 2014

Eyes wide shut — Obama in denial on nature of terror threat

September 2, 2014

A resident of Tabqa city touring the streets on a motorcycle waves an Islamist flag in celebration after Islamic State militants took over Tabqa air base, in nearby Raqqa city August 24.Photo: Reuters

As he raised the terror alert in his country to “severe,” the second-highest level, on Friday, British Prime Minister David Cameron said, “We are in the middle of a generational struggle against a poisonous and extremist ideology.”

True. So what’s needed is coordinated global action, the kind of approach only America can lead.

Instead, Washington’s national-security sophisticates will bore you to death with the nuances separating one jihadi group from another.

President Obama calls the Islamic State “cancer.” Yet, as he told reporters Thursday, “we don’t have a strategy yet” to combat the malignancy.

And it isn’t just IS. We hardly ever talk anymore about core al Qaeda, AQ in the Arab Peninsula, AQ in the Maghreb, al Shabab, Boko Haram, Jabhat al-Nusra and on and on. And those are just Sunnis who dream of a caliphate. Then there’s Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies vying for a Shiite-dominated empire.

But they’re all part of the same cancer.

Last week, Asian jihadi groups in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines swore allegiance to the Islamic State. Why? The dream of a sprawling, Sharia-based caliphate spread by the sword excites fanatics across the globe.

Victories in Syria and Iraq attract IS recruits from all over — Asia and Africa, and also Europe and the Americas.

The jihadi ideology condemns to death, or worse, anyone who doesn’t strictly adhere to its tenets.

It sees America, our allies and all that we represent as pure evil. Makes sense to treat this gestalt holistically, no? Yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got a lot of grief in Washington recently for quipping. “Hamas is IS, IS is Hamas.”

Leave it to the deputy State Department spokeswoman, Marie Harf, to sum up the sophisticate’s nuanced counterpoint to that view: Hamas and IS are “part of the same savagery,” she said, but “they’re quite different in some ways.”

Huh? Can you blame anyone for being confused about where America stands?

While we’ve been trying to discern the ins and outs of hitting this Mideast group while sparing that one (or hitting it one country but not in another), Egypt and the United Arab Emirates flew a joint bombing mission in lawless Libya — because Egypt’s neighbor is becoming a jihadi haven as dangerous as Iraq and Syria, though with far less fanfare.

Cairo didn’t even bother to notify Washington or ask advice, let alone get our permission.

We fine-hone our nuanced policies, while Netanyahu and Egypt’s President Mohammed Fattah al-Sisi have no choice but to fight the jihadis knocking on their doors.

As do the Nigerians, who are (incompetenly) battling Boko Haram, and Somalia’s neighbors, who’re confronting al Shabab. Even the French deployed troops in Mali and the Central African Republic to confront jihadis there.

Yes, in some cases we help out, sending arms to Israel and Egypt and backing allies on the hush-hush. But America isn’t the tone-setter, the coordinator of the global fight, the leader who devises strategy.

But, hey, we’re way smarter than that. For us, you know, each of these groups is “quite different in some ways.”

This is why, instead of devising a strategy, we just send Secretary of State John Kerry to the region to gather a coalition. To do what? Enforce red lines? Been there, didn’t do that.

It’s this kind of thinking that led Obama, in a few short weeks, to shift from deriding the IS as a “JV team” (so nothing to worry about) to calling it “cancer” (and thus a threat to be eradicated).

It’s also the kind of thinking that prevents us from devising a strategy.

For now, America’s oh-so-nuanced fight against the Islamic State is confined to northern Iraq, where we seek to protect US assets and maybe prevent the eradication of the Yazidis or some other minority few in America had heard of before last month.

What about western and central Iraq, the Sunni areas the IS now occupies? More important, what about Syria, where it has its command-and-control centers?

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, said recently, “Can [the IS] be defeated without addressing that part of the organization that resides in Syria? The answer is no.”

But we no longer “defeat” an enemy, so Dempsey was forced to walk back his words — to allow as how, er, as of now, the IS doesn’t pose a direct threat to America.

That’s nuanced.

Yes, there are differences between, say, IS and Hamas. But how can you expect a doctor who won’t treat a heart attack, just because it’s “different in some ways” than ebola, to cure cancer?

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