An Authorization For Use Of Military Force (AUMF) Should Implement A Military Strategy, But The U.S. Has No Military Strategy And Lacks An Adequate Definition Of The Enemy

One of the two principal problems with Obama’s draft AUMF submission to congress is the absence of a military strategy to implement; however, the second principal and more basic problem is that in order to have an effective military strategy, the enemy must first be specifically defined. But an adequate and realistic definition of the enemy is the missing the cornerstone for both an effective military strategy and a comprehensive AUMF to deal with the Islamic jihadists.

The public complaints so far about Obama’s proposed AUMF are that it stipulates a three-year sunset limit to the conflict which angers hawks, and it also contains no geographical limitations to the conflict that perturbs doves. However, it is the definition of the enemy, which no one seems to be complaining about, that is entirely inadequate.

In the AUMF measure before congress, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and/or “associated persons or forces” are singled out as the sole enemy against which Obama seeks authority to conduct military operations. The “associated persons or forces” are defined in the Obama’s draft resolution as:

“individuals and organizations fighting for, on behalf of, or alongside ISIL or any closely-related successor entity in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.”

The identification of only ISIL and associated persons or forces as the enemy is simply another of Obama’s attempts to evade acknowledging that our enemy, and civilization’s enemy, is Islam as comprehensively spelled out in the Quran (Allah’s words reported by Mohammad), Sira (Muslim approved biographies of Mohammad), Hadith (teachings, deeds and sayings of Mohammad), and Sharia (moral code and religious law of Islam).

While ISIL operates in accordance with these four Islamic scriptural documents to carry out Islamic “holy war,” or jihad, so too do “Hamas” in Gaza, “Islamic Jihad” in Gaza, “Muslim Brotherhood” in Qatar and America, “Council on American-Islamic Relations” (Muslim Brotherhood), “Muslim American Society” (Muslim Brotherhood), “Islamic Society of North America” (Muslim Brotherhood), “Boko Haram” in the African Sahel, “Al-Shabaab” in Somalia, “Al-Qaeda” in Pakistan, “Jabhat Al-Nusrah” in Syria, “Khorasan” in Syria, “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” “Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb,” “Ansar Al-Sharia in Libya,” “Islamic State in Libya,” “Ansar Al-Sharia in Tunisia,” “Ansar Bayt Al-Maqdis” in Egypt, “Taliban” in Afghanistan, “Tehreek-i-Taliban” in Pakistan, “Lashkar-e-Taiba” in Pakistan, “Islamic State in Sinai Province,” “Islamic State in Gaza,” “Jemaah Islamiah” in Southeast Asia, “Abu Sayyaf” in Philippines, “Hezbollah” in Lebanon and Syria, “Houthis Ansarallah” in Yemen, “Badr Organization” in Iraq, “Al-Sadr Mahdi Army” in Iraq, “Al-Muqawama Al-Islamiya” Iraqi militia, “Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force” in Iraq and Syria, to name some of the better known Islamic Sunni and Shia jihadist groups around the world. Obviously there are hundreds more Islamic jihadist groups that vary in size and threat capability, but all, whether Sunni or Shia, trace their reason for being and organizational motivation to the Quran, Sira, Hadith, and Sharia.

Since ISIL is complying with the jihad mandates in the four fundamental Islamic scriptural documents, as also are the 30 other above-named jihadist groups listed above, it is undeniable that only declaring ISIL to be our enemy is woefully and misleadingly understating the scope of the threat faced by the U.S. After all, Obama asserts in his draft AUMF that ISIL “poses a grave threat to . . . the national security interests of the United States and its allies and partners.” (It should be noted that although the Sunni and Shia copies of the Sira, Hadith, and Sharia are different texts, they all serve the same function and advocate jihad.)

But the key unasked and unanswered question underlying the entire war is: Why does ISIL pose a grave threat to U.S. interests? The answer is the one Obama avoids acknowledging, and it is because ISIL is complying with the four basic Islamic scriptural documents mandating jihad. And of course, this jihad-compliance answer has an enormous consequence that Obama also desperately wants to escape accepting – that is, it only logically follows that the other above identified 30 jihadist groups are just as much of a grave threat to U.S. national security interests! And since ISIL and all the 30 above Islamic jihadist groups (and hundreds more) are motivated by the same Islamic scriptural sources, it is inexplicable why all Islamic jihadist groups are not designated as exactly what they are, a cumulative, grave global threat to U.S. national security interests!

DOES OBAMA’S INCOHERENCE IN NAMING THE ENEMY MATTER?

The short answer to the above incoherence question is: Yes! Why? Because, if the U.S. were to destroy Sunni ISIL, then the Shia forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, Hezbollah, Bashar Al-Assad’s Alawite State Militia, Badr Organization, Al-Sadr Mahdi Army, and Al-Muqawama Al-Islamiya Iraqi militia are the winners. Furthermore, were the situation reversed and the Shia forces defeated, then the triumph would go to the Sunni ISIL and other Sunni jihadist organizations like Jabhat Al-Nusrah and Khorasan. Clearly, the American media and congressional talk of “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Syria to defeat ISIL is wrongheaded because it does not address the crux strategic question: What’s next?

While the previous 2002 AUMF was actually more open-ended than Obama’s proposed AUMF in identifying Islamic jihadist groups against which U.S. forces can conduct operations by classifying them according to their participation in “international terrorism,” the 2002 AUMF was also mistaken because the criteria should be the jihadist motivation to install the Sharia in conquered territories, rather than whether or not they use the tactic of terrorism. The reason being, it is the Sharia that contains the political instructions to destroy and replace all non-Sharia, man-formulated jurisprudence and constitutions because, once Sharia is established as the god-given reigning legal system, the secular and religious obstacles to making Islam the dominant religion will be able to be removed and eliminated. It is the Sunni Wahhabi Sect in Saudi Arabia that is exporting the message that Muslims have a jihadist obligation to promulgate the Sharia throughout the world. The Saudi Royal Family, Saudi Oil Sheiks, and Sunni Wahhabi Clerical Establishment have been building and financing mosques around the globe to carry the jihadist message using Petrodollars.

To put Islamic Sharia law in its perspective, the Sharia places into practice in daily life the Islamic injunctions contained in the Quran, Sira, and Hadith with the force of law. Therefore, once the Sharia is the controlling legal system, the three existential choices of Islam become operative: 1) Convert to Islam; or 2) Submit, acknowledge the religious supremacy of Islam, and pay an annual blood money extortion “tax” for your life; or 3) Be put to death. It must be noted the single objective of jihad is install the Sharia by violent (war and terrorism) or non-violent (politics and deception) means.

Jihad is an essential and integral part of Islam that cannot be separated or eliminated from the religion, even though not all Muslims may actively practice or even favor jihad. Consequently, using participation in international terrorism as the determinant of enemy or non-enemy status is a false, unreliable, misleading, and dangerous discriminant.

THE STRATEGIC SITUATION

As the American society enters into public and congressional debate on the merits of Obama’s draft AUMF, it is obvious that both Democrats like Obama, Kerry, Rice, and Brennan and Republicans like McConnell, Boehner, McCain, and Graham are rudderless and clueless on how to effectively deal with the scourge of Islamic jihad rampaging through the world. No one in the national leadership has yet mastered the fact that attacking individual jihadist groups like Al-Qaeda, or Taliban, or now ISIL will not stem the worldwide tide of jihad any more than temporarily. There is absolutely no hope of quelling Islamic Sunni and Shia jihadists by merely continuing the singleton-group attack strategy that has been failing for 14 years.

In addition to the Sunni and Shia separate jihads against the U.S. and allies, there is a civil war within Islam that is simultaneously occurring between the Sunnis and Shiites for the dominance of the Islamic umma world community. The U.S. has no business getting drawn into this Muslim sectarian war because, regardless who wins, the U.S. loses for the reason that the other avowed enemy is thereby strengthened.

Conclusion

As the U.S. public and congress turn their attentions to the details of formulating a new AUMF to hopefully more successfully confront the Islamic jihad being relentlessly waged against the West, and take into account at the same time the on-going sectarian war within Islam, foremost in everyone’s mind should be the realization that any alliance in this region is fraught with insecurity.

This realization does not mean that the U.S. must renounce all relations or alliances with Muslim regimes, rather it means that the U.S. national leadership must be aware of the dangers of permitting large numbers of Muslim immigrants into this country, the menace inherent in relying on the trustworthiness of the Saudi Wahhabi Royal Family, the perils of trusting in a nuclear weapons limitation agreement with the Shia Mullahs of Iran, the jeopardy involved in the counter-factual idea that the Palestinian Islamic leadership actually seeks a “two state solution” and not the complete destruction of Israel, the precariousness of the unfounded belief that propping up the inept Shia regime in Iraq is in U.S. interest and not that of the Iranian Shia Mullahs, and finally the folly of not recognizing the pure treachery of the Muslim Brotherhood. And those cautions are just for openers.

However, on the positive side, there are potential Islamic allies in the Middle East whose natural interests are opposed to the jihadists like the current governments of Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Kuwait. Of course, any or all of these allies could turn against the U.S. with little warning because in every non-jihadist Muslim lurks a radicalized jihadist in waiting. Such is the nature of Islam.

(Visit the original source, re-posted with permission HERE)
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Col. Thomas Snodgrass, USAF (retired) served over a year in Peshawar, Pakistan, working with Pakistani military intelligence. During his year in Vietnam he daily scheduled 130 U.S. Army and Air Force intelligence collection aircraft. In his final overseas tour he was the U.S. Air Attaché behind the Iron Curtain in Warsaw, Poland. In total, Col. Snodgrass was variously an Intelligence Officer or an International Politico-Military Affairs Officer serving duty tours in seven foreign countries, as well as teaching military history and strategy at the Air War College, US Air Force Academy, and USAF Special Operations School during a thirty-year military career.

Additionally, he was awarded an Air Force scholarship to get a history master’s degree in revolutionary insurgent warfare at the University of Texas, as well as being granted a year’s educational sabbatical to teach and to write about international relations as an Air Force Research Associate in the graduate school at the Center for Advanced International Studies, University of Miami, Florida. Following the Air Force, Col. Snodgrass was an adjunct professor of military history for ten years at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Arizona.

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