President Obama has been saying there is now less of a threat from extremist Islam than there was before he became president, but he has plenty of critics. One of those critics says the threat from radical Islam has at least doubled in the past ten years, but those in Washington will not even admit the enemy exists.
Former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, spoke on this subject Sunday.
Lt. Gen. Flynn says the entire world is facing a “cancerous component of the Islamic religion” with a fanaticism that opposes the free world’s way of life. On “Fox News Sunday,” Flynn elaborated, saying, “The wolf pack closest to the sled is ISIS, but there are other wolf packs around the world right now that are actually part of this larger expanding, violent extremist version of Islam.”
If you are thinking this is long way from the messages coming out of the White House, you are right. Flynn said what the American public is looking for, from Washington, is “moral and intellectual courage and clarity, and not a sense of … passivity or confusion.”
Flynn says there is plenty of blame to spread around for this confusion around these fanatics, and it isn’t all coming from the White House. He says a growing number of members of both major parties are realizing that more must be done to stop the spread of radical Islam. He says the White House has failed to call the growing problem by what it is: defining the enemy as radical Islam.
Flynn told Fox News, “I think that there’s confusion about what it is that we’re facing. It’s not just what has been defined as 40,000 fighters in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. It’s also a large segment within this radical version of Islam that is threatening our way of life.”
Pointing to a map, he said this is a spreading problem throughout the Middle East. “Ten years ago I was drawing that map and there’s only two or three dots on it. Today, what you’re seeing on a map like that is a doubling of the enemy … a doubling or more.”
We all heard a few months ago, that even though radical Islam has been a big problem for many years, the Obama Administration had no strategy for dealing with it. On Fox, Flynn said, “We need a much broader strategy that recognizes that we’re facing not just this tactical problem of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, … but we’re facing a growing and expanding threat around the world in some cases.”
It is blindingly obvious that the current strategy has not been working. “You can’t defeat an enemy that you don’t admit exists.”
In conclusion,the general, said radical Islam, like other ideologies America faced such as Nazism and communism, must be defeated. But he added that unlike Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s leadership in World War II, there is no one in control now. “If everybody’s in charge, nobody’s in charge.”
If you want to wear the leader’s hat, then it is necessary to lead.
