Releasing Terrorists Is Aiding the Enemy

In another post-election move, the Biden administration’s Pentagon is releasing 11 more “suspected” terrorists from Guantanamo Bay and “resettling” them in Oman, where the New York Times says they will start “new lives.” They include two men suspected of being bodyguards for Osama bin Laden and another man who was believed to be associated with a planned 9/11-type hijacking in Southwest Asia. All 11 “enemy combatants” in the Global War on Terror were held at Gitmo since being apprehended after the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

The Biden administration wanted to release the prisoners in 2023 but backed down after congressional opposition. Biden is also reportedly negotiating with the Taliban to release another bin Laden associate in a trade for Americans being held in Afghanistan.

These moves come on the heels of a military judge insisting that the Pentagon must abide by its controversial plea deal that spares the life of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two accomplices. Despite the Pentagon’s explanation for the release (to reduce the detainee population of Gitmo), the release of these terrorists aids our enemy in what Norman Podhoretz called “World War IV.”

The Global War on Terror launched by the Bush 43 administration, and continued by the Obama administration, had many flaws, including futile efforts to promote democracy and remake the Middle East in America’s image and a diversion of focus and resources from the then-emerging great power competition with a rising China. But the enemy was real.

Podhoretz called it “Islamofascism,” and its intellectual origins could be traced to the 7th century’s idea of global jihad, which radical Islamists have used to justify wars and conquests since then. Podhoretz subtitled his book “The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism,” and it has turned out to be a long struggle indeed. Podhoretz labeled it World War IV to place it in the historical context of the two kinetic world wars of the 20th century and the Cold War which Podhoretz (in agreement with James Burnham) called World War III.

Podhoretz wrote in 2006:

We are once again, up against a truly malignant totalitarian enemy. . . [that] comes from a religious force that was born in the seventh century, that was schooled politically at the feet of the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth, that went on to equip itself with the technologies of the twenty-first, and that is now striving mightily to arm itself with the weaponry of the twenty-first as well.

This war, Podhoretz noted, began in the midst of the Cold War (just as the Cold War began before World War II ended), with Islamic terrorist attacks in the early and mid-1970s. But a crucial development in this war was the Islamist takeover of Iran, which provided radical Islam with a nation-state from which to wage World War IV — one of the terrible legacies of the foreign policy of the late Jimmy Carter. (RELATED: Carter Was to Reagan What Buchanan Was to Lincoln)

Islamists subsequently bombed the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, a truck bomb attack in 1995 destroyed the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (killing 19 American airmen and injuring 240 other Americans), and the USS Cole was damaged by Islamist suicide bombers in 2000. Then on September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda brought down the towers of the Word Trade Center and destroyed portions of the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people.

Podhoretz and other neoconservatives, to be sure, oversold this conflict, which led to the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, that wasted resources and lives, and distracted our attention from the growing threat from China. But our struggle with Islamofascism is real and enduring.

The Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano recently warned that the Biden administration — with its “humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan,” “feckless policies in the Middle East and North Africa,” the “demobilization of our counterterrorism efforts,” and its reckless “open borders” policy — has left us woefully unprepared to meet the challenge of radical Islam.

And now, Biden’s Pentagon has released from confinement more of our enemies who will undoubtedly fill the ranks of Al Qaeda and other terrorist armies. You reap what you sow.

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