On July 22, more than 500 inmates escaped from two different prisons in Iraq, one in Taji, north of Baghdad, and the other at Abu Ghraib prison. Then on July 28 there was a jailbreak at the Kuayfia detention center in Benghazi, Libya, with 1,200 prisoners escaping.
The day following, on the 29th, in the city of Dera Ismail Khan in Pakistan, Taliban and al Qaeda forces forced the release of 250 prisoners. In just a few days, thousands were added to the active forces of Islamic jihad.
Additionally, it has been reported that there are now about 6,000 Islamic jihadists in Syria, many of whom are connected with al Qaeda, an organization always looking for secure bases of operation and for training. As a result, they are now using Syria as a catalyst to spread jihad to the rest of the world.
After going through an election year in which the Obama campaign tried to downplay the terrorist threat to our nation and the world, in order to falsely portray the President as defeating terrorism, we are now finding a second-term administration having to respond to the results of their failed policy of appeasing radical Islam in the first four years.
And respond they have, last week ordering the temporary closing of embassies throughout the Middle East and northern and western Africa.
It is becoming more and more evident that the war being conducted against the U.S. - and against civilization in general - by radical Islam is not going to end by our government just saying it is over.
On November 30, 2012, Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson presented the Obama administration approach to the war on terror at the Oxford Union in England:
“...this is a new kind of war. It is an unconventional war against an unconventional enemy. And, given its unconventional nature, President Obama...has insisted that our efforts in pursuit of this enemy stay firmly rooted in conventional legal principles.”
“For this particular conflict, all I can say today is that we should look to conventional legal principles to supply the answer...”
Johnson and the Obama administration see our foreign policy as fundamentally one of bringing peace to the world by abandoning our “warlike” approach to foreign policy and approaching everything as a matter of law enforcement.
But we cannot look at our military as existing simply to enforce American and international law. Its purpose is to be prepared to fight when there are military threats to our nation’s security and to defend our embassies and other American interests located around the world.
Neither does our military exist so we can bring democracy to the world and depose every leader we deem to be a tyrant. It exists because there are real threats in the world that can only be stopped or held in check because we have a strong military ready to respond to those threats.
Rolf Yungclas is a recently retired newspaper editor from southwest Kansas who has been speaking out on the issues of the day in newspapers and online for over 15 years
