OBAMA CAN NEVER STOP PARIS ATTACKS IN AMERICA

The Upper Cut: The 1 Reason Obama Can NEVER Stop Paris Attacks In America

Sun Tzu, the Chinese master strategist and, tradition tells us, author of “The Art of War,” wrote 2,500 years ago that a failure to understand one’s enemy was the equivalent of a death sentence in time of conflict:

“It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”

We’re in trouble.

It’s bad enough that our president has steadfastly refused to name America’s enemy as “radical Islam” or even to hint that there might be some connection, however tenuous, between the followers of the Prophet Muhammad and terrorist attacks like those in Paris last week.

What’s worse is that he considered the enemy “contained” prior to those attacks — and, apparently, still does. After all, to Obama, the murder of over 100 innocents in Paris was merely a “setback” in his overall strategy.

He does not know America’s enemies.

Obama remains committed to importing tens of thousands of Syrian refugees to America, despite the fact that the Islamic State group has now threatened Washington, D.C., in a similar fashion to their threats against Paris several months ago — which were made good, at least in part, by “refugees.”

This is precisely what Sun Tzu predicted. Obama doesn’t know who his enemy is — or, at least, he won’t admit it publicly — and therefore he cannot hope to prevail against him. In fact, the only enemies Obama appears to be able to get fired up about are the Republicans who have called him out for his failed foreign policy.

Unfortunately, it gets even worse from there: None of the Democrats running for president seem to understand who the enemy is, either.

At the most recent Democrat debate, only 24 hours after the Paris attacks took place, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both rejected the use of the term “radical Islam.”

(So did Martin O’Malley, but I’m not sure anyone noticed.)

This was 12 hours after former Gov. Mike Huckabee issued a statement calling for a comprehensive response to the Paris attacks and after Sen. Ted Cruz made a similar statement, even calling on the United States to be willing to conduct airstrikes with a greater risk of civilian casualties.

Which hints at another important point about knowing our enemy, one that those on the right would be wise to remember:

There are civilians in this conflict. We are not at war with 1.6 billion Muslims. And anyone who thinks we should be needs to re-read their Sun Tzu.

Even if every Muslim were an evil member of some vast worldwide conspiracy, those are not numbers even the full might and power of the United States military would want to take on rashly — particularly not when some 8 million or so Muslims live within our borders.

And not every Muslim is radicalized. I doubt very much that my Muslim brother-in-law has it in for me. Nor does the tiny Pakistani HR intern I worked with several years ago.

But don’t misunderstand me — there are millions of radicalized Muslims throughout the world. A 2013 Pew survey noted that 8 percent of American Muslims believed violence against civilians was “often” or “sometimes” justified in the defense of Islam.

And certainly, I would expect American Muslims to be less radicalized than their counterparts overseas.

But let’s extrapolate that number to the 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide. That implies that there exist at least 128 million Muslims in the world who would advocate violence against civilians — and perhaps half a million or more currently residing in the United States.

Those are scary numbers, and we ignore them at our own peril.

But, just as under Nazi Germany there were many, many Germans who were not party members and who, in fact, helped hide Jews or smuggle them out of the country, so there are many Muslims who do not agree with the teachings or practices of their more extreme leaders.

Even some Nazi Party members — Oskar Schindler comes to mind — worked to subvert the party’s evil plans.

Conservatives must know our enemies, as we certainly cannot expect liberals to do so. And that means knowing both whom we should be fighting, and whom we should not be.

And, perhaps, as Sen. Cruz said, we should be prepared to inflict civilian casualties to win this war. That’s a harsh reality, and one that certainly won’t endear us to Muslims throughout the world. It may, in fact, feed into the Islamic State’s lie that the United States is at war with all of the Prophet’s followers.

Unlike the allied strategy in World War II, inflicting civilian casualties should not be a goal of the United States in what we used to call the War on Terror before we elected an Islamapologist as commander in chief.

But we would do well to bear in mind that an awful lot of German civilians died to bring about the end of Hitler’s evil regime. And you’d have to be pretty far gone not to consider that an acceptable cost for the victory we won.

George Upper is the Managing Editor of Conservative Tribune. In addition to sharing this column, you can also connect with him on Facebook or on Twitter @georgeupper.

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