THE CHALLENGE OF OUR TIME

I plan to take a few days off and relax, but before I do I want to share with you my thoughts about what is going on in the Middle East. Some of you may know that as a military officer, when I wasn't blowing stuff up in the artillery, I was a Foreign Area Officer. The Army sent me to UVa, where I earned my MA in Comparative Governments of the Middle East and Soviet Foreign Policy. I then had utilization tours with UN Peace Keepers (UNTSO) in Syria, Israel, Jordan, and Southern Lebanon. I've seen a lot. That was followed by a tour in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the Pentagon doing current intelligence during the Iran-Iraq War. I learned a lot.

As I observe the President's actions in the Middle East, I am stunned with what I see as breathless ignorance of the threat the turmoil throughout the region poses to America. President Obama speaks tough, but where is the resolve in terms of proactive steps to deal with the threats?

Conflict in the Middle East is not new. It has been present since the nascent years of the 20th Century; reaching back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 when Great Britain announced its support for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. Much has happened since then: several world wars have been fought, the European partition of Arab states as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, numerous regional wars have occurred; the list of dysfunction is long. After the First Gulf War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you can understand why the American people are inclined to stay away from all of it.

But as I said the other day, the challenge of our time is to summon the courage to deal with the challenges of our times. Terror of the sort we see from the Middle East is that challenge. It is a formidable challenge because it brings with it unspeakable violence, the potential for nuclear proliferation, and a destructive 7th Century mentality that threatens the very roots of democracy, peace, religious tolerance, free trade, and, indeed, the core of western civilization.

While Americans are justly war weary, we must meet the challenge of ISIS. They pose an existential threat to us and the Free World. If we treat them, as Eric Holder and the President seem intent to do, as a "criminal problem", we will not defeat them.

In the Army, we use[d] to say that our mission was to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy. If you think you can do that with unmanned aerial vehicles, manned airstrikes, and faux resolve in the form of empty golf-course rhetoric, you would be tragically wrong.

The President must act. He must. He must move immediately and rapidly to build an international coalition to locate, close with, and destroy ISIS, wherever they stand, walk, or run and even when they rest under the slimy rocks where they plan their terror. They one thing they understand is death. Nothing on earth will appease their lust for violence, and certainly not the passivity and reluctance of a great power. Indeed, our inaction fuels their action.

It bears repeating. The challenge of our time is to summon the courage to deal with the challenges of our times. I fear this President is simply not up to it.

This is from Scott Ligamfelter, my representative to the Virginia House of Delegates.