The West and Its Sleeping Giant

Submitted by M. Tovey (United States), Aug 26, 2014 at 14:20

If ever there was a compelling statement of ineffectivity of any current western policy, it can be easily described by the caption; 'the West lacks a plan.' Why is that? The questions posed by Dr. Pipes provide plenty of clues, but in in all of this, a military observation made long and so many times ago is still as apropos now as it was uttered for the first time: know your enemy. The West claiming it does, has proved beyond any reasonable argument that it does not.

Leadership is another aspect of this that relates to the first. When the United States was compelled to enter both world wars, it was only after a determination of the enemy to destroy the United States was revealed (even if politically motivated) as a proximal cause to finally respond. When Americans did become involved, the world knew, as the Japanese military leader opined, they awakened the sleeping giant.

Where is that giant now? In one perspective, he is in a coma.

How else does one explain why America, arguably, the most sophisticated military industrial presence in the world, cannot deal with threats that at one time were thought to be minor skirmishes. Now, a threat that numbers less than a 100,000 in personnel is making sport of America's seemingly lack of resolve to encounter the threat and decimate it. This is not hard folks, as Iraq and Afghanistan have already demonstrated, it requires leadership that has the right kind of resolve.

IS, indeed the entirety of all fundamentalist terrorist cells waving Islamist flags are now demonstrating, the failure to properly identify the enemy that is at the root of it all; and no one seems intent on returning to the power necessary to turn the minds and the tide of the blood drunk ambition of the enemies now running roughshod around the Middle east with impunity and extreme prejudice.

[How can we explain the sudden appearance of ISIS…..?] In an alternative opinion, while the flag waving hordes now identified as the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant-Islamic State are in a revived and renewed blood feud takeover of the Fertile Crescent in a fashion people are not understanding, the unrelenting hatred and motivated affronts to Western style mores is not new, has not been new for hundreds of years. It should NOT be all that surprising; and yet for many, it is. That is why there is no western plan.

The coma of the giant insures that there will likely never be a comprehensive one in the foreseeable future.

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