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.