Will to Lose

The only way the West can be defeated in the war on terror is if they lack the resolve to win. Barack Obama's CIA director Leon Panetta manages to undercut his intelligence agency to rescue Nancy Pelosi's flagging reputation with allegations that the clandestine agency had secret plans to kill or capture al Qaeda members-seeming to confirm Pelosi's dangerous claims of an organization that instead of serving the national interest and following the law-"lied all the time" to Congress. Threaten prosecution for CIA interrogators, question the agency's credibility, and drop their mission to kill our most implacable enemies. Sounds like a formula for victory to me. Engage the remaining two bad actors (North Korea and Iran) from Bush's Axis of Evil (a characterization for which Bush was sometimes mocked) as both nation's procure weapons of mass destruction apace, pursue ever increasing range in the means to deliver them, and in the case of North Korea, become the world's most overt and willing proliferator. In Iran, use the opportunity of their rigged election to praise Obama's Cairo speech as turning the tide of history-then do nothing besides a few Voice of America Persian language service broadcasts chronicling the suppression in the streets-VOA content most Iranians never heard as the mad Mullahs and Ahmadinejad had some success in jamming and blocking incoming broadcasts. This pronounced failure to support a ground-up democracy movement against a wildly unpopular religious fanatic of a leader and his street thug and cleric backers who had in Ahmadinjad's previous campaign promised to uplift the poor but in office had done nothing to ease their plight-even raising gasoline prices and doing nothing to address other deficiencies because so much national resources had been diverted into Iran's nuclear program.  Reward terror and bolster Arab intransigence by falsely elevating Israel's settlement enterprise into the main source of tension  and conflict in the Middle East, all the while ignoring both violent action and genocidal foment against Jews by Hamas, Hizballah, Saudi and Egyptian Wahhabs, Syria, and Iran as the Obama administration is doing. Making Israel the culprit and focus of Western pressure does not further the objective of peace but guarantees continued bloodshed.  In Afghanistan, produce the most restrictive rules of engagement ever imposed on US forces as they are introduced to their highest level of combat with the entry into Helmand. This is a recipe for unnecessary casualties and our ally Great Britain is similarly exposed, sustaining her own bloodletting with fifteen deaths so far this month due largely to a dearth of proper equipment (according to BBC-particularly helicopters). So, from a lack of preparedness by Britain which economized on Boeing Chinooks and is now paying with troopers' lives, to America, which has substituted the need to talk for the need to win and civilization may yet see defeat snatched from the jaws of triumph with darkness, nihilism, and world jihad winning with patience and perseverance.