An Incredibly Dangerous Time to be an American
price on your head is increasing daily
At one point in our nation’s history - not that long ago - terrorists around the world knew very well the danger of kidnapping or murdering Americans.
Attacking Americans had a high cost, and very little benefit. This created a disincentive to target American citizens when at all possible except for those who were incredibly motivated or a bit touched in the head.
Terrorists, pirates, and criminals are like all humans; they respond to incentives and disincentives. Like all predators, they are constantly taking a view of the environment, looking for opportunities that have changed, and responding accordingly.
On the international stage, it is best to be both feared and respected by friends and foes alike; the second requires the first.
Our national reputation suffered generational damage following the national disgrace in Kabul in the summer of 2021, and the same team that brought our nation to that humiliation are still in charge. Their dangerously misguided world view and flawed understanding of the human condition increase the danger to both our nation as a whole, and its citizens individually.
Put to the side, if you can, the fact that if you scale up by population from Israel to the USA, on October 7th, 2023, the Israelis suffered what to the USA would be over 40,000 murdered, more injured, and wholesale rape on a scale our nation has never seen. Thousands kidnapped. Always keep that in mind when thinking about what Hamas is and why Israel is doing what it must.
Keep that in your nogg’n as you watch the below interview by CNN’s Dana Bash with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
Before I get to it, I want to remind everyone that five American citizens remain hostages of Hamas … and unless I missed something at no time in this interview does Bash bring them up. It is almost as if they don’t exist. The only time they are brought up is in passing by Sullivan, who implies that if the hostages were to be rescued, it would have to be by Israelis. Amazing, but … that gives me the impression that we will not go in to get our own people. I can find no other explanation.
You can watch the full interview if you want, but I’ll start the video at the 6:50 mark.
You really have to read it to get the full impact of what he said:
Why is President Biden going out publicly and calling for a ceasefire and hostage deal? It’s because he thinks the best way to get all of the hostages home is in a deal where they’re brought out diplomatically, where there’s no need for military operations to get every last hostage out. So that would obviously be the best solution to this in the absence of that without Hamas saying yes to the deal on four fundamentally, we are going to continue to see ongoing conflicts and military option in which Israel makes efforts to recover its citizens and frankly to recover American citizens. What we would much prefer to see is a ceasefire where the hostages come out peacefully.
Takeaways
We’ve gone from, “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.” to “We want to negotiate with terrorists.”
If you are an American citizen being held hostage, don’t expect your $800+ billion military to rescue you. If you are lucky, little Israel might bring you home.
Does no one in this Biden Administration understand why the attacks of October 7th took place? Has no one red-teamed this and briefed decision makers? Hasn’t our intelligence community captured Hamas communications about this?
In the quote above you see Hamas getting a reward, being supported on top of the hundreds of millions of dollars of aid we are sending them. On top on allowing their supporters free run of our major cities and universities, creating chaos and damage that would not be tolerated by any other political movement to their right, they get rewarded with negotiations.
Anyway, just watch that interview. Think about what Hamas has done. Think about how cheap this administration holds the value of American citizens. Think about how dangerous that makes every American who travels overseas or otherwise finds themselves in the sights of terrorists.
Think about what it would take to reestablish deterrence, so we are all safer.
Lots of hard work needs to be done.
"On September 30, 1985, a group of gunmen seized four Soviet diplomats and embassy workers (Arkady Katkov, Valery Myrikov, Oleg Spirin, and Nikolai Svirsky) in Beirut. During the kidnapping right outside the embassy, Katkov was wounded in the leg.
[T]he KGB kidnapped a man they knew to be a close relative of a prominent Hezbollah leader. They then castrated him and sent the severed organs to the Hezbollah official, before dispatching the unfortunate kinsman with a bullet in the brain.
In addition to presenting him with this grisly proof of their seriousness, the KGB operatives also advised the Hezbollah leader that they knew the indentities of other close relatives of his, and that he could expect more such packages if the three Soviet diplomats were not freed immediately.
Soon thereafter, the surviving three hostages were dropped off by the Soviet embassy “from a late-model BMW that couldn’t drive away fast enough” and never again was a Soviet (diplomat or otherwise) kidnapped in Lebanon.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/how-to-deal-with-hostage-takers-soviet-lessons/
Thus ended the problem...
I forget who said it first, but for 15+ years of consistent bipartisan policy in this regard, America is universally regarded as treacherous as a friend, harmless as an enemy.