On Thursday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow, Dr. Herbert London of the London Center for Policy Research said that war has unquestionably come to America’s shores.
“It’s in Orlando. It’s in San Bernardino. It’s in 9/11. It’s at the Boston Marathon. It’s in Chattanooga. It’s in Fort Hood,” he said.
“We are now facing a war internally. We can turn our backs, we can say it doesn’t exist, we can engage in denial, but the fact is, it’s here. Americans understand that. That’s one of the reasons why national security has emerged as one of the most important issues that we are now facing,” London said.
He predicted:
In the past, it was always the bread-and-butter issues: how much am I going to earn? How many jobs are going to be created? What is the inflation rate? But now, we have a very different set of conditions: Can you maintain security? That is going to be one of the central issues, perhaps the overarching issue, in this campaign.
“I think that the next President of the United States has to be able to assure the American people that we’re going to do something on this score,” he added.
The Orlando atrocity made London think of advice from George Orwell: “The first responsibility of the intelligent person is to restate the obvious.” With that in mind, he stated: “This man was a jihadist, number one.”
Said London:
Maybe there were psychological problems, and maybe there was some sort of resentment toward homosexuals, or maybe he was divided in his own position on this matter, but the fact is that he shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” He made it clear that he was going to provide allegiance to ISIS forces and Baghdadi, the leader of the ISIS forces. So there was no doubt in his mind that he was doing something that was consistent with ISIS.
“Therefore, there is an inspiration here, and the inspiration is ISIS itself, and militant Islam,” he continued. “We have to be able to define the enemy, which, of course, the President has been reluctant to do. And not only define it, but think through what are the appropriate tactics for dealing with this phenomenon. Because it is not merely defeating ISIS.”
“If that happened tomorrow, if ISIS were gone, if I could wave a magic wand and there is no ISIS, there would still be militant Islam. We would still be facing the same problem,” he contended. “This is a hydra-headed problem, and as a hydra-headed problem, we have to think through what are all of the tactics needed to deal with it. It’s not only the bullets on the battlefield that win this victory. It’s also a question of an ideational war. How do we come up with ideas that counter whatever appeal the ISIS group and the militant Islamic groups have?”
He judged that this was something the American government “has not thought through very effectively.”
He said:
It’s a long war. It’s a war not unlike the Cold War, where there was a doctrine involved, namely communism, that we had to defeat. Just as there’s a doctrine involved here, namely militant Islam, that we must defeat. And we can do so. There are elements within the United States that understand this. That’s one of the reasons why we were successful in the Cold War. We know how to fight this ideational war. We’re just not doing it.
“My feeling is that we need more intelligence, better intelligence. We need dirty tricks, of the kind that were played in the Cold War. We need alliances with people who may not be the best of friends, but people who know how to fight this war with us,” London recommended.
“We also have to put ourselves in a position where propaganda plays a very significant role. After all, if you consider da’wa, the daily way in which Islamists are supposed to conduct their affairs, we know that imams across the world have different interpretations of this,” he continued. “Why not put those interpretations online and indicate that there is confusion within the Islamic world? Build on that confusion, just as we built on the confusion associated with the doctrine of communism.”
“In Eastern Europe, towards the end of the Cold War, if you said you were a communist, it was almost a laughable proposition, in almost any university in Eastern Europe,” London recalled. “This has to be a laughable proposition, as well. The 17-year-old who thinks he’s going to engage in war with ISIS because it’s romantic and because there are concubines associated with it, we’ve got to make sure that he understands he’s going to live, for the rest of his life, in a box.”
Dr. Herbert London’s latest article, “Obama’s Strategic Patience,” can be read here.
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