When Clinton said, "...what difference does it make?.." I knew right then that she did not understand the Jihadists. I have written two other blogs on this subject, but I think that I need to write another one. I am sure that what Clinton was trying to do was to get us to focus on "catching" the Jihadists since our four citizens were already dead. Clinton was wrong on two key points. Spending a lot of effort and money catching the Jihadists and "bring them to justice" would be worthless in the war on terrorism. It would not put "fear" in the hearts of the Jihadists. They did not care if they died while killing our people, so how would "bringing them to justice" make us any safer? The second point is that our only defense against Jihadists is to "prevent" them from killing our people in the first place. Jihadist have no fear of punishment. The big question that needs to have been answered was "who" was responsible for protecting our people and "preventing" the attack in the first place? I think that was Clinton first and Obama second. Those are the people who wanted those jobs, so why didn't they do their jobs? Is it because they were first concerned about their own personal political skins not the people who elected them? You bet!
We need to start understanding that Jihadists are a very different kind of enemy and not try to just use our historical western methods. They have zero fear of punishment, so we can't stop or prevent them from trying to kill us by putting a few of them in jail. For that idea to work, we would have to put several millions of them in jail. If it were even possible, it would bankrupt the country. It is clearly not a solution. If not, what is?
First of all, we all live with risk every day of our lives. A tree could fall on you or you could be hit by car. There are thousands of ways that you could lose your life every day and we just live with them. You could fall down a flight of stairs and be killed, but we still have to walk up and down stairs. So, what do we do? We live with the risk and try to minimize it. We don't and can't eliminate risk 100%. We all know that. We all have to make "trade off's" between the cost of the risk and the cost of minimizing the risk. Notice that I did not say eliminating" the risk? It is a balancing act and we all do it every day of our lives. You won't get killed in an auto accident if you don't drive to the store for food, but if you don't drive to the store, you will eventually starve to death. It is a trade off.
Now, Jihadists and terrorism are no different. It too is a trade off. How much money and time can we afford to spend to "lower" the risk of being killed by a terrorist? We don't have unlimited wealth or time. Where is that balance? This is what we need to be talking and thinking about. Aside from money and time, what kinds of things that we now do "not" use to fight crime that we should use to fight Jihadists and terrorism. How much of our freedom should we give up or risk to lower the risk of being killed by a terrorist? These are all new questions that no one before us has ever had to answer. That means that it is up to us to start figuring this all out. I feel that all alternatives need to be on the table. We may agree to take a few off after we have evaluated them, but at first they all need to be on the table. Take "torture"? Some do not even want it on the table to start with. Why not? Take electronic eaves dropping? Same thing! What we need to do is to discuss these alternatives "before hand" rather like we are, after the fact. Once we come to a conclusion that most of us can agree on, that is how we will all be living in the future. This is not a perfect world and you can not hold out until "God" comes down with that "perfect" painless solution. Get used to it!
Clinton was part of the problem, as was Obama. Those two owe it to us to "start" the conversation about how we deal with Jihadists and terrorism rather than the two of them trying to cover their butts. We deserve better, but we have to act better ourselves too.
