The JV team is on a brutal streak
We remember when President Obama referred to ISIS as "the J.V. team." Later, Mrs Clinton walked away from the remarks.
One way or another, the Obama administration completely misjudged ISIS. They hung their hat on the theory that "we ended wars" and learned the hard way that ISIS never signed the "truce."
Let's just say the J.V. team is scoring one major-league success after another, from Paris to Baghdad this weekend. They are killing lots of people, to say the least.
The latest theory is that ISIS is losing land and moving into terrorism against soft targets, as we saw in the New York Times:
In just the past few days, the Islamic State’s evolving brand of terrorism has revealed its deadly, shifting faces.
In Istanbul last week, Turkish officials say, militants guided by the Islamic State conducted a coordinated suicide attack on the city’s main airport. In Bangladesh on Friday, a local extremist group that has pledged loyalty to the Islamic State butchered diners in a restaurant.
And in Baghdad on Sunday, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for a bombing that killed more than 140 people.
The theory may be right but it does not ease my fears that terrorism is coming, and lots of it is coming.
There are a couple of things going on here:
First, ISIS depends on young recruits, especially the fanatical kind who is willing to give his life for the cause.
Second, success breeds recruits. In other words, it does not matter that they apparently lost a city in Iraq. What really matters is that ISIS is dominating the news cycle with one bomb after another. The death toll this week is huge!
So how do you deal with fanatics? There are no easy answers, but we can start by reacting to their successes with some successes of our own, such as blowing up field camps and putting law enforcement on a war footing.
Trump is right on this one. We have to drop the P.C. nonsense and concerns about language. We need to fight back with everything we have.
For now, the J.V. team is beating Obama. Fair or unfair, that is what the potential recruits see on a daily basis. And the recruits just keep on coming because people do follow the strong horse.
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