The November 13 Paris terrorist attack was well-coordinated with suicide bombings, grenade attacks, deadly shootings and hostage taking. As body counts rose, France's borders closed and a state of emergency declared. Hours later, the Islamic State [ISIS] threatened it was just the first with more to follow.
Seated somewhere in a parallel universe the day before the attacks, President Obama told ABC News he believed ISIS was contained and controlled. Granted, that was prior to the Paris attacks, but it was as if he was completely unaware of the group's expansion worldwide, with recent ISIS-related bombings in Beirut, the downed Russian passenger jet in Sinai, recent beheadings of women and a child in Afghanistan, and massacres in Pakistan, Iraq and Syria.
For reasons only they can explain, President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose to ignore ISIS back before it grew into the scourge of the civilized world. Token drone hits, like the supposed recent drone killing of "Jihadi John," are positive, but fall far short of the action needed in the region to make a significant difference.
If you've ever watched toddlers play "Hide and Go Seek," they cover their eyes, because they think they are invisible. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton built a foreign policy around that mentality, believing they could somehow "will" Islamic extremism into obscurity by pretending it wasn't there. Or at least convincing the electorate there was nothing to see before the 2012 elections, suggesting al Qaeda was "decimated" and ISIS was a "jayvee" team.
ISIS metastasized while President Obama went about his merry way deflating the U.S. military and treating it like a liberal social experiment. Now Americans are dangerously vulnerable, thanks to porous borders and an administration refusing to follow the rule of law to protect them.
Awhile back, House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) told NBC's Meet the Press that terrorists are just "one plane ticket away from U.S. shores." He's correct, given current U.S. visa laws and regulations permitting citizens of 38 participating countries to "visit" the U.S. for 90 days without a visa under the Visa Waiver Program [VWP] and stay here undetected, thanks to the Obama administration's refusal to enforce U.S. immigration laws.
With the influx of a multitude of unidentifiable refugees presently flooding into VWP countries, it's not a stretch to suggest that members of Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS might gain entry. Like Europe, America doesn't have an effective way to filter out the bad guys. Recently, a man with connections to an ISIS-linked group attempted to enter Italy by boat. The Independent reports the Tunisian, Ben Nasr Mehdi, who was arrested in 2007 for plotting terrorist attacks in Italy, was found hiding among 200 migrants rescued at sea, "claiming that he was seeking asylum in northern Europe to escape political persecution," under the cover of a false name.
Fortunately, he got caught, but there is no way to know how many militant extremists didn't - and could make a legal visit to a town near you with little effort, thanks to an administration preoccupied with packing in as many new Democrat party voters as possible before Obama leaves office.
During the same interview, Rogers said the U.S. is extremely vulnerable because the Obama administration missed dozens of opportunities to eliminate Islamic State militants from the battlefield. Rogers also raised concerns that "the United States intelligence services and Department of Defense and administrative policy is not configured in a way to continue a tempo that allows disruption" of ISIS and added, "The reason ISIS is so successful is there was nothing deterring them for years."
It's a bit hard to deter or defeat something you don't take seriously, even when Paris burns. The solution for what happened in Paris is that good men with guns neutralize evil men with guns. Otherwise, the innocent among us have no chance.
The world waits for America to lead.
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