Rules of Engagement
May 26, 2015
Among the most subversive of Barack
Obama's tactics in undermining the United States' sovereignty and our
position as a world power is his administration's ongoing redefinition
of the rules of engagement as they apply to our border patrol agents,
our armed forces, and our local police.
It seems that for the president,
if the rules imposed on those defending our freedom do not put them at
dramatically increased risk of losing their lives, and if those rules
of engagement do not weaken our position against the enemies of freedom
that are at our gates, then they're too strong and must be further crippled.
The old saying is, "Don't bring
a knife to a gunfight." In the case of our border patrol agents,
they can't even bring a knife. When confronted with armed smugglers crossing
our southern border, they're encouraged to fire beanbag rounds at any
intruders before using live ammunition. In other words, they're told to
warn south-of-the-border criminal transgressors of their presence and
location before they use deadly force.
That rule cost BORTAC agent Brian
Terry his life on December 14, 2011, when he and his team confronted a
group of Mexican drug smugglers who were armed with assault rifles in
an area inside the U.S. along the Arizona border. Two of the four American
agents fired the beanbag rounds their policy manuals insisted on; the
smugglers responded with AK-47s.
Compounding the administration's
liability, it's a near-certainty that the drug smugglers who killed Terry
were armed with rifles that Attorney General Eric Holder had transferred
to Mexican drug cartels as part of the ill-conceived Operation Fast and
Furious, which allowed some 2,000 assault weapons to be purchased by illegal
aliens from U.S. gun stores, after which they were transported into Mexico
unmonitored.
The results of the Obama administration's counter-insurgency strategy
in Afghanistan have been even more devastating.
Between 2001 and 2008, 630 U.S. soldiers
lost their lives fighting in Afghanistan. In 2009, the newly-installed
Obama administration put its COIN (Counter-Insurgency) strategy into practice.
COIN made it extremely difficult for American troops to confront and kill
Islamist insurgents. As a result, in the five years following the implementation
of COIN in Afghanistan, nearly 2,300 American troops were killed. Put
another way, more than 75 percent of American deaths in Afghanistan have
occurred in large part as a result of the current president's rules of
engagement policies.
Their blood is on Barack Obama's
hands.
The victims of the Obama administration's
restrictive rules of engagement policies aren't limited to those defending
our country. Perhaps the most devastating consequences of Obama's subversive
restrictions on how defenders of freedom must deal with criminal activity
have been to the residents of America's inner cities.
In this case, the administration's rules-of-engagement policies have resulted
in the police in cities in several states being unable to exercise their
authority for fear of being prosecuted by their superiors, with assistance
from the United States Department of Justice.
Nowhere is that better represented
than in the city of Baltimore, where six police officers have been indicted
on charges that include manslaughter following the death of Freddie Gray
as a result of injuries he sustained while he was being transported to
jail following his arrest. Egregiously racist and irresponsible comments
against the police by Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Baltimore
City State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby led directly to the violence and the
police stand-down during the rioting. Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony
Batts's comments - "We are part of the problem. . . . Now we have
to change." - further exacerbated the situation.
After Gray's death, the situation
had deteriorated dramatically for the residents of Baltimore's Sandtown-Winchester
area. Violence escalated uncontrollably. In the month following Gray's
death, homicides in the city were up 40 percent over the same time period
the previous year. Non-fatal shootings were up 170 percent over that same
time period. Two dozen people were shot in a 24-hour period on May 20
in Baltimore. Memorial Day weekend saw 26 shootings in Baltimore, with
nine of them fatal.
In the wake of the DOJ's intervening
to make certain that the rules of engagement would prevent Baltimore police
from doing their jobs, the price paid by the citizens the police had risked
their lives to protect has increased exponentially. Like our soldiers
and our border patrol agents, innocent citizens in Sandtown - the very
people whose interests Obama claims to support - have the president's
rules of engagement to thank for making their lives even more dangerous
and difficult than they had been before.
Our president is guilty of what amount
to treasonous actions in reducing and even eliminating the ability of
the guardians of our freedom to protect us from our enemies, within and
without. Those enemies include members of Mexican gangs and drug cartels,
along with "coyotes" who transport illegal aliens across our
southern border. They include merciless Islamists seeking nothing less
than the defeat of the United States and its reduction to servitude at
the hands of the most primitively brutal enemy we have ever fought. And
now, it would seem, they have expanded to include criminals in America's
inner cities.
Barack Obama's policies, especially
where they impede our armed forces and immigration agents from doing their
jobs, have led to a disturbing decline in the morale of our military and
those defending our borders. Even the citizens in our cities now face
the likelihood that they will no longer be protected against the criminals
in their midst because the willingness of local police to risk their lives
and careers ebbs as the rules-of-engagement policies of a subversive administration
continue to expose them to increased danger.
We're entering the heyday of Mexican
drug gangs, Islamist radical insurgents, and inner-city thugs. The only
conclusion we can draw from the new rules of engagement that have led
to the unimpeded rise in the success of our enemies is that Barack Obama
is on their side and not on the side of those he should be sworn to defend.
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