ISIS must be destroyed

OPINION:

The FBI continues to sort through what it did right, and what it did wrong, in its early dealings with Omar Mateen, the Orlando killer. That’s good, but what the White House should be doing is sorting through what it has done wrong in the fight against the Islamic State, or ISIS or ISIL. The president’s strategy, to put it kindly, has been confused.

There has never been a question of the enormous potential for ISIS to inflict enormous suffering in America and the West. The world has rarely seen such naked brutality, conducted with such brazen efficiency. It’s just that dramatic aspect of the cult which attracts psychopaths to its colors. Its weapons are formidable in the hands of those who celebrate death, not life. Assassins of the gun, the knife, and the suicide bomb make up a lethal enemy. Their cult teaches that deceiving non-believers — infidels, it calls them — is justified if it promotes Islam. There could not be a more attractive target than the open society of the United States with a feast of targets for such psychopaths.

The FBI concedes that “mistakes were made” in dealing with Omar Mateen when he first came under official scrutiny, but there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of potential Mateens abroad in the land, and thousands more waiting to be infiltrated into the country, given the loose borders and flabby immigration enforcement which President Obama enthusiastically tolerates.

Moving beyond a certain line in suppressing the terrorists who want to move among us would emasculate the civil liberties that makes America work. This is what the radical Islamic terrorists have set out to do, to create an atmosphere of suspicion and repression that would fatally wound the idea of America, and then — in the cliche with a large kernel of truth — “the terrorists will have won.”

President Obama and Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, avoid calling the terrorists what they are, radical rogue Muslims, in fear of offending the millions of peaceful followers of Mohammed. Mr. Obama, in his public pronouncements, tries to make terrorism something “home-grown,” as if the terrorists are as likely to be Presbyterians or Episcopalians as radical Muslims. This makes the struggle to suppress the threat of ISIS all the more difficult.

The civilized world rightly set out to destroy the Nazis despite the assumption that there were millions of “good Germans” who were not Nazis. The long Cold War was conducted against Soviet communism even though millions of Russians were suffering under the Marxist yoke as well. After those wars were won, the innocents suffering in the Soviet Union readily conceded that their struggle for survival was strengthened by Western resolve.

The West struggles against a similar totalitarian opponent in the present day. Islam is not only a religion but an ideology as well, indivisible from its determination to create political regimes often intolerant of dissent. That’s what makes the struggle against the radicalized version of Islam so difficult. President Obama said the U.S. strategy would be to “contain and dismantle” the Islamic State, as it calls itself, but ISIS has continued to grow and spread its evil to other regions, to radicalize Muslims and enlist them as soldiers to kill and maim peaceful Muslims as well as the “infidels.”

The only successful strategy is to go after ISIS in the way the United States and the allies went after the Nazis, all out, to destroy in a dramatic fashion. Anything less won’t work, as massacres in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino and now Orlando have taught as a grim and bitter lesson.