No, Mr. President, It’s the Terrorists Who Will Never Win This War

Last week President Obama gave a speech—as he is fond of doing—significantly altering the national security of America.

Among calls to close Gitmo (the United States naval station Guantanamo Bay), end the Authorized Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF) and ignore the threat posed by al-Qaida, Obama said something that cuts against the very core of America.

He essentially said we can’t win the war on terror. At no time in our history has an American president ever said we can’t win a war we were fighting.

Obama’s words were astounding: “Neither I, nor any president, can promise the total defeat of terror. We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society.”

To him, if he can’t win the war on terror, no one can.

In fact, the only time he directly addressed the war on terror was to reject the war on terror. “We must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror,’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America,” he said.

In other words, we must treat the Boston Marathon bombings in a vacuum; treat the recent beheading of a British soldier—on the street, in broad daylight—in a vacuum; treat the assault on our consulate in Benghazi in a vacuum; treat the “workplace violence” of Nidal Hasan in a vacuum—as if each instance didn’t have one singular thing in common: radical Islamic jihad.

The fact remains that jihadists are at war with us, regardless of whether our president chooses to recognize it.

And for those who see the “war on terror” as a rhetorical struggle, how much more important is it for us to not give up the high ground—to let the terrorists know we will never give up the fight.

It is not for Obama to declare that the war on terror is one that we cannot win. No, Mr. President, it’s the terrorists who will never win this war.

Terror, surrender and capitulation are their goal. We must not be accomplices to their end by shrinking from this fight.

America will never succumb to terror. We will stand firm. We will stand tall. We will fight united as one.

Yet in his speech, Obama asserted that we should once again respond to the threat of terrorism the same way we did “before 9/11,” as we would to merely “deranged or alienated individuals” like the Oklahoma City bomber. Such reasoning is naive beyond reason.

The threat we faced on Sept. 10, 2011, was no less than it was the next day. On 9/11 the threat of Islamic jihad didn’t change. What changed was that we became aware of the threat in a way like never before. To go back is to once again ignore the treat we face on a daily basis.

To declare an end to the war on terror today is to declare the Second World War abandoned in 1944. Even worse, it is to declare fascism dead when Mussolini was ousted in 1943.

The facts remain: There are those in every corner of the globe who want us dead in the name of Allah (global); who are at war with the West (war); whose objective is to create mass casualty of the iconic in a public display of terror (terrorism). There is a global war being waged by the terrorists. This is no time to leave the fight. Our children and our grandchildren’s security depend on it.

Matthew Clark is associate counsel for government affairs and media advocacy with the American Center for Law and Justice in its Washington, D.C., headquarters.