Faulty Foreign Policy Assumptions About Islam: The place where Democrats and Republicans See Eye-to-Eye
November 5, 2012 Leave a comment
After the fall of communism, the Democrat administration of President Bill Clinton assumed that there was no threat to U.S. interests, the indisputable evidence of the rise of Shari’a-compliant Islam notwithstanding. Clinton pretended that the Islamic jihadist attack on the New York World Trade Center in 1993; the Islamic jihadist attack on U.S. military famine relief force in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993; the Islamic jihadist attack on the U.S. Air Force troop barracks in the Khobar Towers, Saudi Arabia in 1996; the Islamic jihadist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya in 1998; the Islamic jihadist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 1998; and the Islamic jihadist attack on the USS Cole in 2000 were not Islamic-motivated terrorism! It doesn’t get any more dysfunctional than that! After seven years of Islamic jihadist attacks and threats of attacks, most directly traceable to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, U.S. foreign policy was still functioning on the Democrat Party’s baseless assumptions that Islam is benign and poses no national threat to the U.S. In reality, Clinton’s foreign policy was principally to subordinate his goal of getting reelected in the 1996, and in his second term Clinton’s foreign policy priority was primarily to preclude failures in order to preserve his “legacy”. As a result, Clinton passed up several opportunities to take out bin Laden and al-Qaeda in his caution to avoid hard decisions that had the potential for consequential gain or disaster. Clinton’s Democrat administration dealt with the Islamic jihadists and their terror attacks as international outlaws committing crimes in an effort to mislead the American public about the Islamic threat. Clinton worked diligently to cover up the ineptitude of his denial policy regarding Islamic jihad to preserve the fiction of his foreign policy effectiveness. A sympathetic media assisted him greatly in his prevarication.
Then came the Republican administration of President George W. Bush. Shortly after taking office, Bush was confronted by the second jihadist attack on the New York World Trade Center in 2001. After almost 3,000 Americans were murdered on 9/11 by Islamic jihadists, the Islamic religious connection to the continuing terrorism against the U.S. was no longer deniable, although many Republican and Democrat politicians and policy makers still try to this day. Nevertheless, Bush advanced the ball forward from where Clinton had left it by acknowledging that the 9/11 perpetrators were in fact Islamic jihadists, not criminals, and by declaring the U.S. response to the Islamic jihad was a “Global War on Terror” (GWOT). Of course, the idea of declaring war against the “tactic of terror” rather than declaring war on the Islamic jihadists using the tactic of terror discredited the concept of “GWOT” from the beginning, and more ominously it indicated that there was a continuation of some variation of Clinton’s denial that Shari’a-compliant Islam is a national security threat.
According to President Bush’s 2010 memoir, Decision Points, the “Bush Doctrine” for fighting Islamic terror contained four fundamental precepts. Unfortunately, the fourth precept ultimately cancelled the effectiveness of the other three out, thus undermining and ultimately destroying Bush’s GWOT by the end of his second term in office. The Bush Doctrine precepts were:
- “Make no distinction between terrorists and the nations that harbor them–and hold both to account.”
- “Take the fight to the enemy overseas before they can attack us again here at home.”
- “Confront threats before they fully materialize.”
- “Advance liberty and hope as an alternative to the enemy’s ideology of repression and fear.”
The difference between the assumptions underpinning Democrat and Republican foreign policy is one of degree rather than substance.
Clinton worked on the assumption that the Islamic religion was no factor at all in the attacks on the U.S., while Bush’s equally invalid assumption was that a hijacked, perverted version of Islam was motivating misguided Muslims to commit their murderous acts. Consequently, different degrees of politically correctness denying the violent, imperialistic character of Islam was the difference between Clinton and Bush. Lamentably these politically correct, reality-adverse interpretations of Islam still underlie Democratic and Republican basic foreign policy assumptions about Islam, rendering both dysfunctional.
To make matters worse, President Barack Obama’s Democrat regime, that replaced the Bush’ Republican administration in 2009, dropped even the inadequate Republican assumption that Islamic jihadist terror stemmed from a hijacked, perverted version of Islam. Instead Obama’s national security policy and strategy documents, directives, and public statements erased every mention of Islam, Qur’an, Shari’a, and jihad! The Obama national security team eliminated all-things-Islamic as causes of jihadist terrorism, and narrowed the focus down to “al-Qaeda” as the sole enemy to be fought! The elimination of Islam as a cause of terrorism and as a national security threat is a cynically transparent political move to define a potential worldwide threat pool of millions of Shari’a-motivated Islamic jihadists down to a few hundred shadowy al-Qaeda terrorists hiding in caves and deserts. According to Obama’s version of the threat facing the U.S., al-Qaeda fanatical terrorists are motivated to kill Americans by some unnamed, undefined, intangible “radicalism,” but not Islamic Shari’a.
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