Ding, Dong Osama’s Gone…Next!

“We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us.” – George Orwell

I thought I would wait a bit to see if I still felt the same, but today was as beautiful a Monday morning as the last. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the trees are blooming, and Osama Bin Laden is dead! Ah, justice delivered in the springtime. It doesn’t get much sweeter smelling than that.

I am not a fan of President Obama (if you haven’t noticed), but I have to give credit where credit is due. At least he “pulled the trigger” in this case instead of wanting to-at great cost and unnecessarily-arrange a sit down.

So let us take another moment and celebrate the success that started in the Bush Administration and ended in the Obama one with OBL KIA. Hip, hip, hurrah! Hip, hip, hurrah! Thank God for the rough men who visited violence in the night upon the most wanted man on earth along with the thousands of men and women who supported the effort. Those who wish us harm now fully understand they cannot trust their mobile phones, couriers, or even a pigeon–smile, you’re on satellite camera. Well done.

Okay, moment’s over.

I know that is going to irritate some, but I am not about to–to borrow a phrase–take my boot off the neck of this Administration and their cohorts who are destroying this nation from the inside for doing their job–protecting American citizens and killing our enemies. The Presidency is a tough job and if you can’t take the heat, get out of the House.

It may have taken ten years, but once engaged, leave it to our special forces to do the job quickly, professionally, and with extreme prejudice. Unlike two presidential administrations and the DOJ, who know exactly where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11, has been for those same ten years. Maybe we should think about calling in the Navy Seals to assist with dispensing justice to that particular terrorist, since they appear to be eminently more qualified to accomplish the task and take their job quite seriously.

I am glad that the families of 9-11 and We the People received some long overdue closure for this portion of our war against those who viciously attacked us. And while this part of the mission has been accomplished, the war is far from over. I don’t like to refer to it as the “War on Terror,” because I agree with Congressman Allen West, “You can’t say this is a ‘war on terrorism.’ Terrorism is a tactic, and a nation can’t fight a tactic.” You wage war against an enemy of flesh and blood, and that enemy is radical Islamists bent on continuing their overt and covert jihad against all infidels, along with those they view as not “Muslim enough,” that started in the sands of Arabia over a millennium ago.

There are those who refer to our current state of affairs with Islamists as the “Third” or “Fourth Jihad.” I believe a lesson has been learned by those Islamists when it comes to awakening the sleeping giant, as Japan did in World War II, where Secretary Clinton said it best, “You cannot wait us out. You cannot defeat us”–at least not militarily.

I, along with many, hope that the “Arab Spring” doesn’t degenerate into a full blown reinvigoration of whatever phase of Jihad we may or may not be in, with a radicalized Islam covering countries from Morocco to Turkey to Yemen where the ancient Caliphate once stood. In possession of the fuel required to, not only cripple the West, but fund acts of terror unlike we have encountered before, along with access to nuclear weapons of mass destruction supplied by a country that has vowed to acquire and use them-Iran.

We have many difficult choices and struggles that yet lie ahead.  One positive choice we could make today would be to close the cases that have been re-opened against CIA personnel acting under the orders and cleared during the Bush Administration. The idea that good men and women acting in accordance with the legal orders of the Presidency in one Administration could be retroactively prosecuted in the next is deplorable and seems similar to a “bill of attainder,” which is an utterly unconstitutional principle

Another would be ending the outrageous invasion of privacy we must all endure at the hands of the TSA. As Michael Walsh stated in the New York Post,

Last month, the video of a TSA goon intrusively patting down a 6-year-old at the New Orleans airport justifiably went viral. Here was a little girl being subjected to the kind of treatment that would be called molestation were it not conducted by a government employee.

This sort of outrage has got to stop. The TSA — an organization that arguably doesn’t even need to exist at the federal level — needs to show the same sort of targeted aggressiveness that the Special Ops units do, and stop playing defense by essentially criminalizing everybody who walks into an airport.

Clearly — unfortunately — we can’t go back to the days when air travel was like train travel. Some sort of reasonable screening process is vital; cockpit doors need to stay locked and hardened. But, like the Israelis, we should be looking for terrorists, not just for weapons.

On the difficult side of the ledger, there looms our relationship with Pakistan. As Victor Davis Hanson points out, “So did we operate with or without Pakistan’s help? If the latter, and if it is proven that OBL was hiding in plain sight, I think it could be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back of this Orwellian partnership with Pakistan – despite the PR to come that we owe, are in debt to, etc. to Pakistan. We will need some honest talk for a change about exactly what is going on.” Any illusion we held as to whether the billions of dollars in aid we have given was inspiring the Pakistanis in a positive direction has been shattered.

And then there is the question of Afghanistan. Should we continue at great cost in blood and treasure to prosecute the war in the manner we have to date? With OBL dead and KSM detained, have Al Qaeda’s capabilities been sufficiently degraded to the point that we can shift to a strategy that deploys our special forces and drones wherever terrorists rear their ugly head, as opposed to large scale operations?

Serious questions which must be answered, along with one last one–who’s next?

And finally, to all those “conspiracy theorists” out there who cause so much distraction from serious issues, please unless we see OBL live on CNN, give it a rest will you.

Copyright 2011 Julie Schmidt.