Obama Caused Orlando: Daniel Greenfield
The media has desperately tried to blame anything and everything for the Orlando Muslim massacre. The bloodshed by a Muslim terrorist has been attributed to guns, homophobia, family problems and mental illness. But Omar Mateen told his Facebook friends and a 911 operator exactly why he was doing it. Omar killed 49 people as part of the Islamic State’s war against America.
The motive is there in black and white. This was one of a number of ISIS attacks. The roots of the Orlando attack lie in Iraq forcing us to dig down into Obama’s disastrous mishandling of ISIS. Without understanding what went wrong in Iraq, we cannot understand what happened in Orlando.
Under Bush, Al Qaeda in Iraq had been on the run. Under Obama, it began overrunning the region.
In 2009, Obama vowed a “responsible” end to the Iraq War. He claimed that the “starting point for our policies must always be the safety of the American people”. But the safety of the American people was the first casualty of his foreign policy. In 2011, he hung up his own “Mission Accomplished” sign and boasted that “The long war in Iraq will come to an end by the end of this year.” It did not and would not.
Obama claimed that his withdrawal from Iraq and his invasion of Libya were both examples of successful policies. Both countries are now ISIS playgrounds. The “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” Iraq he told the country we were leaving behind was a myth. The new Libya was an equally imaginary and unreal place. ISIS gained power and influence as a result of that chaos. And it used that influence to kill Americans.
Today the battle for Fallujah is raging. When ISIS first took the city, Obama breezily dismissed them as a JayVee team. He specifically insisted that ISIS posed no serious threat to America. “There is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”
“Fallujah is a profoundly conservative Sunni city… And how we think about terrorism has to be defined and specific enough that it doesn’t lead us to think that any horrible actions that take place around the world that are motivated in part by an extremist Islamic ideology are a direct threat to us,” he said.
It is now blatantly and indisputably obvious that ISIS is a direct threat to us. Orlando is yet another reminder of how deeply wrong Obama was about ISIS. Instead of taking action, Obama chose to ignore the expansion of ISIS until it had become a major threat. As a result of its victories, Al Qaeda in Iraq went from an Al Qaeda affiliate to declaring the Islamic State while commanding the allegiance of Muslims around the world. Omar Mateen was one of those Muslims.
If Obama had not dismissed ISIS early on, it would never have gained the level of support that it did. And the Orlando massacre might never have happened.
But Obama was not the only proudly neglectful parent of ISIS. The two key elements in the rise of ISIS were the withdrawal from Iraq and the Arab Spring. The withdrawal gave ISIS freedom of action in Iraq allowing it and its Shiite frenemies in Baghdad to roll back the stability of the Surge. The Arab Spring however destabilized the region so badly that ISIS was able to expand into countries like Syria and Libya. The migration of Jihadists into the region swelled its ranks enormously and turned it from a local problem into a global one.
And the Arab Spring was a project of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Obama created space for ISIS in Iraq, but Hillary Clinton opened the door for the rise of ISIS in Libya and Syria. Together they helped make ISIS into a regional and then a global player.
Hillary Clinton tried to blame the “internet” for the Orlando attack. But Al Gore’s magical internet did not shoot 49 people in Orlando. For that matter it did not “radicalize” Omar Mateen.
Omar, like many other Muslims, was impressed by the ISIS victories that Hillary’s Islamic regime change project had made possible. He viewed these triumphs not as the result of a disastrous State Department and White House policy, but as proof of the religious authority of ISIS. Omar wanted to join the fight.
Muslim terrorism existed before ISIS. It will exist after ISIS. But there is no doubt that the Islamic State’s claim to having revived the Caliphate and its impressive string of victories against the Iraqi military convinced many Muslims that they were religiously obligated to follow its orders.
And these orders were quite explicit.
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