by Michael Ledeen
July 22, 2016

As I have been saying for quite a while, the terrorists are in a hurry. They know that their free run at their enemies will not last much longer, and so they are eager to grab whatever they can as fast as they can. They expect things will get tougher when the next president takes over in January.

For the moment they expect the Obama administration to make nice to Iran and Russia, Cuba and China, and the other members of the global alliance arrayed against us.

Ergo Nice. And Baton Rouge. And Milwaukee.

There will be more, and I will be surprised if there are not more attacks here in the United States.  We are still not fighting to win the war. We are on defense, which is a sucker’s game.

FieldofFightAs General Flynn and I wrote in our book The Field of Fight, you can’t devise a winning strategy if you can’t define your enemy and his mission. We can’t, because the censors forbid it.

So we cannot say the simple truth: we are under attack from a global alliance of radical Moslems and radical secularists — some are countries (such as North Korea, Cuba, Iran, China and Russia), some are organizations (al Qaeda, ISIS, Islamic Jihad, etc).

Since we cannot speak their name or define their mission (destroy us), we cannot shape a winning strategy. Indeed, President Obama has publicly condemned anyone who talks about winning. Instead, he and Secretary of State Kerry are embracing our enemies.

We can’t go after radical Moslems and their sponsors in places like Damascus and Tehran because it would violate the speech code. In Rhodesspeak, it would also give the lie to the myth of the Big (No) Deal with Iran, and wreck current efforts to make a similar (no) deal with Russia to reinforce Assad’s bloody tyranny.

Whatever actually happened in Turkey, the outcome there strengthens Erdogan’s Islamist tyranny. Obama predictably sided with his old pal in Ankara .

We embrace those who are attacking us, and condemn those who want to defeat them. In like manner, our leaders in America show open sympathy with those, like Black Lives Matter, who incite terrorism, and imply that terrorists’ targets—cops above all—are somehow guilty of racism.

Inverting the real order of things, many of our leaders insist that terrorist acts are invariably carried out by “self-radicalizing lone wolves” but there are both racist and Islamophobic conspiratorial networks.

Take Nice, for example. The mass murderer was initially described as a mentally disturbed loner, but now it seems he was asking somebody—via a text—to send him “more weapons,” he had sent a considerable amount of money to his family in Tunisia (even though he had no apparent source of income), and he had contacts with known Moslem radicals.

So we’re losing.

— Michael Ledeen holds the Freedom Scholar Chair at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, DC. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and currently a senior advisor to Donald Trump. The article first appeared at To The Point News.