I sat in for Mr. Gaffney today and had a fun show. Jim addresses the Administration’s lack of a Grand Strategy for dealing with militant Islam and provides his solutions to the security issues created by these clashing cultures. Next, Jim talks with documentary film maker J.D. Johannes of outsidethewire.com who just returned from Afghanistan and will be discussing his experience. Later, Jim visits with David Bellavia an Iraq combat veteran and author of House to House about the battle of Fallujah, about the classified intelligence documents posted on WikiLeaks and his take on the damage this has done to US efforts to gain trust of the local populous. Finally, Jim talks with Noah Pollack, Executive Director of the Emergency Committee for Israel. Noah gives a brief overview of his organization and its efforts to combat the immediate threats to Israel in the American political debate in the midst of the midterm elections. Powered by Podbean.com They transcribed my monologue which I'll post below the fold. 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...
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Posted
Jul 30 2010, 05:45 AM
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