Soap Box

It was a pleasant day for early September in the Tennessee midlands where the temperatures can range in the high 80s at that time of year. Hazel and myself had gone to the Tennessee Driver Services Center to renew our carry permits.

My son, Charlie, called me on my cell phone shortly after 8 o�clock Central Time and told me about the planes colliding with the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.

We finished our business and headed for home which was a strange ride with the radio blaring every scrap of information and every rumor that came across their desk in a desperate attempt to get the news out, and the reality dawning on an unsuspecting public that something new and terrible had finally found it's way to the shores of our beloved United States of America.

As the day progressed and the attack on the Pentagon and the forced crash in Pennsylvania took place, America huddled around our TV sets and anxiously wondered where it would end, how far would it go, what horrible event was going to be next, who had done it and what were we going to do about it. 

The memorial service the president attended a couple of days later was more of a nod to diplomacy and political correctness than a memorial service as clergy from almost every major religion represented in America stepped to the podium to express sympathy for the families and prayers for the nation.

Of all the things President George W. Bush said that day, the only ones I remember are his three or so reassurances that "Islam is peaceful religion", as if he was trying to ward off a rush to judgment, probably knowing, or at least relatively sure that the attacks had been carried out by Muslim extremists and fearing that the American people, whose anger had grown to white hot proportions by that time, would take out their frustrations on innocent American Muslims.

The world changed forever that day in 2001. Security became the byword and no fly lists and intelligence gathering became focal points that heretofore had basically been moot. The rules on airliners were drastically changed and intense baggage inspection became a part of every flight as the flight decks were enclosed with bulletproof materials and locked for the duration of the flight.

Our armed forces drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan, dethroned Saddam Hussein and seriously degraded al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups and brought Iraq under control helping the Iraqi people to truly elect their own leaders.

Enter Barack Obama. If anybody in America believed what George Bush said that day about Islam being a peaceful religion it was him and he set off around the world bowing and scraping and telling the world that there was a new sheriff in town and the imperialist, expansionist, big kid on the international block was going through a fundamental change and would no longer be the implacable bully forcing it's influence and policies on a helpless world.

He immediately changed the nomenclature concerning terrorism, even refusing to use the term, changing terrorist to �foreign enemy combatant� and set out to prove that all the people who wanted to destroy America needed was a little love and understanding. Kill them with kindness, bow to a Saudi King, defend every perceived slight aimed at Islam and inform our enemies of when we would be pulling all our troops out of Iraq. 

Anybody who has any doubts about the abject failure of Obama's policies has to look no farther than what has happened in Iraq as the demon hordes of ISIS roll across the land raping, beheading, kidnapping and pillaging, all in the name of that peaceful religion.

As of this writing there is fighting on Syria's border with Israel in the Golan Heights area. ISIS is in Syria and the likelihood of their attacking Israel from that point is very high.

Obama knew about ISIS a full year before most of the rest of us ever heard the term and in his usual "never do something unpleasant today that you can put off until tomorrow" attitude, sat back and watched these animals take back territory that had been paid for in American blood, simply because he wanted to appeal to his base and pull all the troops out of Iraq.

Politics!

Nobody knows for sure how many American citizens have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight with ISIS, USA passport holders who could return here with knowledge in their heads and murder in their hearts.

No matter what happens from here on, our golden opportunities to destroy ISIS have passed by and now the unfortunate thing is that somebody is going to have to put boots on the ground to do it.

A lot of countries have a dog in this fight and a truly international coalition including nations from the area would be ideal, but I just don't know if Obama can saddle that horse.

Iraq and Syria are just the appetizers, what ISIS and all radical Islamic groups want is Israel and America and to think they will ever stop without doing everything in their power to accomplish it is naivety in the extreme.

When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was released from GITMO he made the statement to his former guards, "I'll see you guys in New York."

And he meant every word of it.

What do you think?

Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem. 

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels