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President Obama and ISIS: Which Line Should We Cross?

By Dr. Terry Simmons
In Homeland Security Contributor

Once more we are at the crossroads. America is faced with another policy decision with significant international political ramifications based on the following perennial question: Do we put aside our recent foreign policy altruism and take up our traditional global enforcer role? Syria, Iraq and fundamentalist jihad are knocking, again.

President Barack Obama famously (or infamously according to whom you talk) drew a red line over Syria which he later reconsidered in the face of unforeseen circumstances. Russian President Vladimir Putin stepped back onto the international foreign policy stage as an interlocutor while re-establishing the Russian Federation as an international power broker. The threatened tomahawk cruise missile attack against Syrian WMD chemical weapons facilities by the Obama administration was forestalled with the promise of Russian initiated and American-supervised elimination of Syrian chemical weapons.

President Obama is essentially facing the same decision-making scenario again with the serious reconsideration of attacking Syria after all, and now Iraq as well (now in the form of Islamic State (IS)) as ISIL-ISIS expands its caliphate ambitions dramatically in the most draconian terms.

With the recent gruesome and abominable exhibition of unspeakable cruelty in the beheading of American journalist James Foley, IS Caliph Ibrahim, aka Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (AQI), has declared open warfare on the United States. He is inviting American retaliation in a surprisingly sophisticated political-intelligence dangle to re-involve the United States militarily in the Middle East—once more on a grand scale.

Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey displayed uncharacteristic public alarm at the audacity of al-Baghdadi, now the self declared Caliph of Islamic State. Ibrahim has openly declared that his next target is America. Counterterrorism experts in the United States are not given to exhibiting emotional responses to the asymmetrical enemies of their nation; such reactions are counterproductive in the intelligence business. After all, the very purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, resulting in the gaining of psychological advantage that may catalyze and actualize political gains denied an asymmetric opponent through symmetric political/kinetic means.

Has the terrorist tactic of killing in a culturally abhorrent manner via a public decapitation stirred up the extreme revulsion of a western audience not yet desensitized to such acts? The question seems appropriate in our fast developing oppositional relationship with the new Islamic State. Is the tail once more wagging the dog as happened to the United States in Korea, Vietnam, Iran and on Sept.11, 2001, with Islamic States’ precursor organization al-Qaida?

Did President Ronald Reagan succumb to Iranian pressure to supply missiles to Tehran in order to secure the release of the American embassy hostages after 444 days of unrelenting captivity (and thereby win the election)? Were American pilots in Vietnam, American prisoners of war in North Korea, captives from American University in Beirut and countless others throughout Middle East confrontations, sacrificed on the expediency political alter and ultimately used to manipulate the American political system? I can only imagine that, yes, there does exist an intelligence graduate course that teaches this repetitive and worthwhile lesson on how to manipulate the psychologically hypersensitivity of the American national psyche.

Will President Obama repeat this cycle of the tail wagging the dog? If a combatant, whether journalist or soldier, is killed in combat, does it really make a difference if he or she is killed by bullets from an AK-47 or by the blade of a sword? It does, indeed, appear so! What is different this time? What are the new dependent variables at work in this decision tree matrix? Are we simply witnessing a new variation on an old theme, packaged in new labels and a psychologically clever new branding?

America is no longer a fledgling democracy. We have been consistently offshore and engaged in international affairs to include extensive warfare since 1898 when imperial America was born. We have suffered extreme hardships and endured many losses. Does it beg the question to assert that Americans still take extreme exception to barbarism executed with impunity? Our adversaries might use Nagasaki and Hiroshima as prime examples of American barbarism in the field. Are they justified in this?

What guides President Obama in this crucial decision to continue to demilitarize American foreign policy in favor of soft-power solutions, or return to the field of battle? Looking at the precursor inventory of pre-invasion surveillance hardware listed in The New York Times article Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2014, front page headline: Obama Approves Air Surveillance of ISIS in Syria, there can be little doubt what comes next. We have all seen this movie many times before.

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