Paris, What Now?

Paris is a reminder that evil is always with us, and that is not the answer that most of us don’t want to hear. Many of the responses on Facebook expressed the horror and disbelief, with responses coming from folks who are rarely politicaly active but stunned at the carnage committed. The Paris attacks were a reminder that we are one generation away from barbarism and we are now seeing what happens when the United States retreats from the world and the barbarians take hold.

Lesson one to be taken from this, we have the weakest political class ever and the Obama administration has to take responsibility for the rise of ISIS and the chaos. The old “It's Bush's fault” excuse can no longer hold. Obama has not taken foreign policy seriously and before the Paris attack, his administration viewed climate change as the number one foreign policy, while ignoring the complete collapse of the Middle East that has occurred under his watch. Hundreds of thousands in the Middle East have died since Obama took office, but since these lives were mostly Arabs who are unfortunate to be stuck in this hell hole created by Obama’s policies, no one really cares. It is estimated that nearly a quarter of a million have been killed in the present Syrian Civil War. The millions of refugee headed for Europe are another aspect of Obama’s failure. With the Paris massacre, Obama’s failure is now complete.

Americans need to be reminded of what the Middle East looked like when Obama took office and Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State. The Middle East was as stable as it could be with Iraq's insurgency defeated on the ground, a nuclear facility in Syria destroyed by the Israeli air force, and Iran was not just isolated but the economic sanctions had their effects as Iranians protested in the street in the summer of 2009. China was not challenging us in the Western Pacific and Ukraine still had control over all its territory. The world was safer. Obama/Clinton/Kerry foreign policy has been a disaster, and even the consensus over free trade is now collapsing as well as Obama’s Asian free trade agreement is now threatened by a coalition of Populist Republicans and leftist Democrats which is most of the Democratic Party. Obama and Clinton need to be held responsible for their foreign policy follies. While it is impossible to prevent all terrorist actions, the reality is that the rise of ISIS and Iranian hegemony over much of Iraq and Syria did not exist before 2009.

The second lesson is that Republican primary voters have a responsibility as well since we have candidates running in the upper tier who simply don’t have foreign policy experience or even basic knowledge of the issues involved. One of the biggest failures of many Republicans beginning with Jeb Bush is explaining the failures of the Obama/Clinton policies and even worse, defending his own brother’s successes. Too many Republicans have allowed the idea that the present situation is the fault of Bush’s foreign policy, and it was the invasion of Iraq that caused the present situation as oppose to Obama’s own failures.

Republican voters must now view foreign policy as a criteria when making a decisions and if nothing else, Rubio-Paul's debate over foreign policy now takes a larger role as Paris shows that we need to examine not just which candidate has the right policy mix, but do they truly understand how we got into this present situation?

Lesson three is that we must recognize our enemy and be able to actually say the words, radical Islamism. Throughout the Harry Potter series, one could never mention the name Lord Voldemort and throughout the first five books, this failure precluded any serious attempts to deal with the coming war as too many within the witch’s community would not believe that a threat occurred, and the refusal to mention his name simply allowed them to pretend that the evil did not exist. For many of our political class including the President, the failure to even name the enemy is simply a refusal to admit that the threat exist. If we don’t have to deal with radical Islam, then maybe we can simply deal with make believe issues like climate change! Paris is a reminder that evil exists and denying its existences doesn’t make it go away. The attack on Paris has its roots over Obama/Clinton/Kerry's failure in the Middle East, and now it is time to recognize the truth: Radical Islam threatens Western Civilization. Meanwhile, the big climate change conference to be held in France will not be canceled. We must have our priority.