When President Bush stated the case for pre-emptive war, he was roundly denounced. That denunciation became full-scale blowback when we failed to find massive rooms full of WMDs in Iraq (although there were clearly WMDs in Iraq in some quantity). Here was Bush’s basic justification for the war in Iraq: “if we let up, we’ll be attacked … I can assure you [the terrorists], who would like to attack us again, have got plenty of patience and persistence. And the question is, will we?”
We have our answer now. And it’s no. We didn’t have the patience; we elected Barack Obama president of the United States because we didn’t have the patience. We didn’t have the intestinal fortitude. And now Islamists all over the Middle East have been emboldened. And, just as President Bush predicted, we’re going to have to fight them over here now.
That fact became eminently clear yesterday, with Israeli and American officials announcing that they had raised their security levels to fight Iranian terror around the globe. In New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, security presence surrounding Israeli sites is up. It’s also up at non-Israeli Jewish sites around the country. And while anti-Semites may not believe it, Jewish Americans are still Americans – which means that American citizens are being threatened on American soil.
This is what happens when you hand Islamists moral victories. President Obama pulled precipitously out of Iraq, turning it into an Iranian proxy state-in-progress. He backed the Libyan uprising, turning Libya from a horrific dictatorship that did not threaten us into an Islamist state that does threaten our interests. He supported the Egyptian revolution, which replaced an American ally with an American enemy focused on blackmailing the United States for money by threatening to break off the Egyptian treaty with Israel.
So now we’re fighting them over here. Whether or not you agreed with the war in Iraq, the fact is that threats to the American homeland decreased exponentially while we were fighting it. Now that it’s over, the threat of worldwide terrorism is up once more. And it’s much harder to defend against a terrorist attack than to kill a terrorist on the battlefield.
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