Politically Correct National Security

[This is a copied section from an E-mail list I am on run by former senator Rick Santorum and the EPPC.]

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In case you missed it, last week was an unfortunate, spectacular example of politically correct national security policy. Most impressively, it included a dramatic shift in U.S. nuclear policy. According to The New York Times (and the President of the United States) the new policy “eliminates much of the ambiguity that has deliberately existed in American nuclear policy since the opening days of the cold war. For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NNT), even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyber attack.”

As if theoretical compliance (note previous challenge to UN inspectors in Iraq, North Korea, Iran, etc.) with a treaty is justification to take off the table the deterrent effect of a responsive nuclear strike if Americans are attacked by horrific biological or chemical weapons or the nation is ground to a halt through a cyber attack. Moreover, how long does one wait after being attacked by a nuclear weapon from terrorists supported by NNT “compliant” countries. This groundbreaking policy certainly eliminates many contemporary difficulties with when to consider preemptive action to protect Americans as with Iraq, by unilateral surrender, the simpler politically correct alternative to making hard decisions in defense of our national security.

You may not be surprised to find that according to the Associated Press the President’s advisers have ordered the removal of “religious terms” such as “Islamic extremism” from the central document outlining the U.S. national security strategy and will use the rewritten document to emphasize that the United States does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terror, counterterrorism officials said.

The change is a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventative war and currently states: “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.”

The officials described the changes on condition of anonymity because the document still was being written, and the White House would not discuss it. But rewriting the strategy document will be the latest example of Obama putting his stamp on U.S. foreign policy, like his promises to dismantle nuclear weapons and limit the situations in which they can be used.

In the last decade, radical Islamists have killed more than 8,000 Americans, innocent civilians and those serving in the Armed Forces, and wounded thousands of others -- but it is politically insensitive in the Obama Administration to mention that their ideology and actions have been the primary source of these deaths and remain our primary threat, let alone to build our strategy around defeating them!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -