Mission Accomplished? Hardly.
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Whether President Obama Likes it or Not, the War on Terror is Far from Over
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Late this week, federal agents arrested a man who they allege planned to carry out a suicide bombing at the U.S. Capitol. The individual was arrested as he walked from a parking garage near the Capitol building carrying an automatic pistol and bomb vest, both (thankfully) rendered inoperative by FBI agents performing an undercover sting operation on him.
This is serious stuff and not just from the alleged wild imagination of Dick Cheney.
Had this attempted terrorist met actual enablers and not FBI agents, this could have been a Pearl Harbor, of sorts, in U.S. history.
And it comes on the heels of President Obama’s exit from Iraq 2 months ago, impending exit from Afghanistan and proposed drastic reductions in defense spending under the justification that we have achieved our goals.
Hardly.
As President George Bush was bitterly derided for his “Mission Accomplished” banner shortly after the Iraq invasion, so too must Mr. Obama be held accountable for declaring the end of hostilities in the War on Terror well before they are actually over (the phrase “declare victory and get the hell off the battlefield” comes to mind). And at least Mr. Bush, supposedly the intellectual inferior to Barack Obama, learned from his mistakes and corrected such with the the Surge in 2007.
After 3 years, it is evident that Mr. Obama is uneasy, unprepared, or both, when addressing foreign policy matters. His comfort zone is clearly domestic politics and redistributing wealth by pitting the rich versus the poor.
But the world in which he was elected President is one that does not allow him to be just a domestic issues President. Whether he likes it or not, one of his charges, in addition to many others, is Protector in Chief.
The arrest this week of an attempted terrorist who would’ve dealt unimaginable horrors on this country is an issue that all Presidential candidates this year, especially our sitting President, must address.
No matter how much Mr. Obama wants, the mission is hardly accomplished.
-I.M. Windee
