Colucci: Failed leadership is to blame for increase in attacks

Lamont Colucci, associate professor and chair of the Department of Politics and Government, had an opinion piece published in U.S. News & World Report. It criticizes President Barack Obama’s approach to terrorism and the Country Reports on Terrorism 2014.

“The report is typical of government documents like this, exhaustive in detail, with so much minutiae that it can avoid controversy,” Colucci wrote. “It is overly lengthy at 389 pages so as to give the impression that it is so large it is unassailable. What reports like this fail to do is address the cause and solution. The report lauds the Obama administration for captaining the effort for the U.N. Security Council to pass the 2014, United Nations Security Council Resolution 2178 which called on member states to take action to stem the flow of foreign terrorist fighters. The resolution has done absolutely nothing to stem the tide of violence, human rights abuses or the seizure of territory. It is the poster child of international liberalism whose adherence to multilateral calls to action is the guilt-assuaging method to avoid real action.”

He writes that Tina Kaidanow, ambassador-at-large and coordinator for counterterrorism, was asked during a press conference whether the United States has been effective fighting terrorism.

“ ‘I think we have been effective in building the capability of our partners globally in a variety of regions and places,’ she said. Here is the Obama policy writ large: It is not about American leadership, American action, the American mission or American goals; it is about some figurative faith in multilateralism that rarely takes on corporeal form.

“The Obama administration made an active choice to not support the moderate resistance movement in Syria from 2011 onward when it could have dominated events, instead of allowing them to be controlled by events, leading to the rise of the Islamic State group.”

Colucci concludes that the state sponsorship of terrorism is recognized in the report, notably by Iran, Syria and Sudan. “These regimes have engaged in the worst human rights atrocities and, in the case of Iran and Syria, have attempted to develop and even use weapons of mass destruction. If the Obama administration were truly interested in using American leadership to solve a problem, save lives, and enhance international order and law, to create some semblance of peace, it must resurrect and direct the might of American power against the cancer that these tyrannies have created.”

The full opinion piece can be read here.