BlackFive

Monologue: I want to talk a little bit today about our lack of a grand strategy for dealing with the greatest challenge we are facing today, the war of cultures dealing with militant Islam. And yes, unlike Eric Holder I am capable of identifying what the problem is and articulating it. And I think beyond articulating it, we have to come up with a plan and we have to have some sort of grand strategy as apposed to just little tactical fixes that seem to me like putting a Band-Aid on a suckling chest wound. I guess what prompted this for me is a number of things, first of all we now have General Petreaus as commander in Afghanistan, sad as it was to see McCrystal go, and salute him as he retired next week, Petreaus is a brilliant man and will do as good a job as anyone in out arsenal could. You could add general Mattis now as likely to be confirmed now as CenCOM commander. I believe we have the right military team in place to put our strategy of population centric counter insurgency in play and, you know, prosecute that to the best extent possible. The problem is, that’s not enough. That is not a strategy to solve the problem of that lead us to the war we are fighting there. The problem is that we don’t have a strategy beyond the military one. We don’t have a whole of government approach. We don’t have a strategy in this clash of cultures. And that’s really where we actually have to put a lot more of our efforts and energies. And I think there is a lot of discussion and I guess differing ways to look at that and differing ways to approach it. A lot of folks are disgusted by the way the current administration has totally ignored who our enemy is and I agree completely 100 percent. But I am going to go ahead and do something that if frank was here, he would be raising his eyebrows again, I am going to give president Obama and his team credit for one thing. They are moving in the right direction for the wrong reason. They have decided that they are going to pretend that Islam is not part of the problem, and consequently they are not going to mention Islamic extremism. They have taken it out of their national security strategy; they refuse to actually articulate that fact. That’s wrong. That is wrong as a reason. What we need to do though is we need to make a strong differentiation between that part of Islam, the extremist part of Islam, and those who we cannot make enemies of, alright? We’re not going to win this was over that part of Islam, against extremism, against Shar’iah, against those who want to restore the global caliphate. We are not going to win against them unless we enlist a large portion of the rest of the Muslim world against them. We have to put a wedge between those two groups, and that’s not something you can do at the barrel of a gun. At the risk of sounding like a pacifist, and I hope you folks know that I am former Army Special Forces, I am hardly a guy who shrinks away from making dead tangos. I think that is a worthwhile cause, I also believe its not always the right answer to a problem, and the problem we have now is how do we drive that wedge between the bulk of the Muslim community which is not violent, which is not trying to take over the world and which is not a evil cult. How do we put a wedge between them and the extremists? I think there something this week, coming from a part of the media conglomerate, where you don’t normally look for an ally if you’re on our team, and that’s time magazine. Their cover this week is a very disturbing but all too familiar look at the face of Islamic extremism. It is a picture of a 19-year-old afghan girl who had her nose and ears cut off for fleeing an abusive forced marriage. Now that happens way, way, too often and I think it’s a situation where we have to face it, they have to face it. W we need to use all of the weapons in our arsenal of western liberal democracy, to try to convince the bulk of the Muslim community that they cannot support that, and that they should join us. And I think it’s a place where if you look at that being on the cover of Time Magazine, hardly a conservative bastion, hardly a conservative outlet, if they are willing to say that this is no good, then perhaps there is an ability for us on the right to ally with the rest of the western left. To say that it’s not right for half of the worlds women Muslims to be repressed, enslaved, honor killed, or treated as property or chattel. It is a horrifying situation, and I think sometimes it takes that type of horror to go ahead and galvanize those who should be speaking. I mean, where are the western feminists, where are they in this whole equation. Why are they, are they willing to that type of behavior and can we not enlist them and the media and Hollywood in demonizing these types of people. Why can’t we get the western noise machine stating that we don’t believe that this planet, in any way shape or form should tolerate that type of barbaric behavior. It’s uncivilized and we do not have to allow that type of cultural equivalence. There is nothing on earth that says that we have to accept that people are willing to treat half of their population like that have no rights, like they should not be educated, that they should be stuffed into potato sacks. It is outrageous, and I think that’s as good a starting place as any for our war of information. All right, we have the kind of folks in charge, we have the right type of folks moving in our military operations in Afghanistan, but that’s just one small part of the larger war, of the larger grand strategy that’s needed. We need the state department, we need the NGOs, we need the military like time to be willing to join this battle. And it is, it is a clash of culture, there are far to many Islam dominated countries right now, where the rules are completely skewed against females, where the rules are skewed against nonbelievers, you know there are places where you can not possibly accept them as legitimate parts of what I would call decent society. It’s time for us to go ahead and plant a flag in the ground. You know, we don’t want to be at war with Islam, the president has accidently and weakly stumbled into the right message. The problem is you have to be willing to plant the flag on the other side of that line and say, “however within your group you are tolerating those who act in ways that we are not willing to accept, and we are not going to let it happen again, any time, and place or anywhere. We oppose it, we will fight it, and in the end we have a good chance of beating it.” So, I think that’s the way for us to go forward, that is a grand strategy and I think that’s the way we should go. Once again, this is Jim Hanson on Secure Freedom Radio.