“I hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” With those words, George W. Bush, America’s 43rd president, launched the war against terror.
Thirteen years later, his successor
appeared to signal in his State of the Union address that the war on terror was over. “Tonight,” President Obama in-
toned, “we turn the page . . . America, for all that we’ve endured, for all the grit and hard work required to come back, for all the tasks that lie ahead, know this: The shadow of crisis has passed, and the State of the Union is strong.” Obama’s paean came one month
after a terrorist seized 18 hostages inside a café in Sydney for 16 hours, leaving two dead; two weeks after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, where the death toll was 12; and one week before a new splinter group called the Islamic State-Tripoli Province at- tacked a luxury hotel in Libya’s capi- tal, Tripoli, killing nine people includ- ing American contractor David Berry. If the war was over, someone ne-
glected to inform the jihadists. The horrifi c incineration of a cap-
tured and caged Jordanian Air Force pilot in an elaborately produced vid- eo that was posted online in Febru- ary stunned the civilized world — no doubt the very reaction the Islamic extremists hoped to evoke. In response, Jordan’s King Abdul-
lah vowed he would attack ISIS until his military “ran out of fuel and bul- lets.” But analysts predicted the ex- ecution video would be an eff ective, global recruiting tool to help swell the ranks of the terrorist organization. Given the steady stream of pass- port-bearing jihadists getting into
48 NEWSMAX | MARCH 2015
the fi ght in the Middle East, many national-security experts warned that for America, the worst was probably yet to come. “There is great likelihood that what
we’ve seen is only the beginning,” Steven Bucci, one of the Heritage Foundation’s top security experts, tells Newsmax. “For one thing, ISIS is winning, and that is one of the prime recruiting tools for people unhappy with their lives. Its success off ers a clear alternative to the disaff ected.” Throughout Europe, national-se-
curity chiefs began 2015 by dashing from meeting to meeting, hobnob- bing over how to counter the terror cells that they suspected were operat- ing within their own cities. Yet, in his address President Obama mentioned neither “al-Qaida” nor “Islamic ex- tremism” a single time. Even the president’s customary
supporters voiced concern that his ac- count of the war on terror was eerily out of touch with reality, as if months of national-security updates had dis- appeared into his junk-mail folder.
“There was a general tone of sus-
pended disbelief,” NBC foreign corre- spondent Richard Engel reported. “It seems that the rose-colored glasses through which he was viewing . . . for- eign policy were so rose-colored that I think they don’t even refl ect the world that we’re living in.” Just days after the president’s
speech, the president of Yemen — the chaotic home of al-Qaida in the Ara- bian Peninsula, the al-Qaida branch that claimed responsibility for the Paris massacre — looked out his win- dow to see his palace surrounded by Iranian-supported Houthi militia- men. With a ring of insurgents in machine-gun equipped pickup trucks facing him, he and his entire govern- ment responded the only way they could — they resigned. “As he spoke,” The Washington
Post’s editorial board remarked, “his strategy was crumbling in a nation he failed to mention: Yemen.” The reversal in Yemen, target of
more than 115 drone strikes since 2002, came just four months after
AMERICAN JAPANESE
P. 46,47: FAYAZ AZIZ/REUTERS / P.48: AMERICAN, JAPANESE/AP IMAGES JORDANIAN/REUTERS TV/REUTERS / GRUNGE BORDER/ISTOCKPHOTO
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