November 1, 2017

Moments after news broke of the horrific attack in New York City that has claimed that lives of 8 innocent people and injured many more, Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, a Koch funded, right wing think tank that advocates for lower taxes, less consumer and environmental protections and reduced social programs, came out insinuating that maybe we need other ways of dealing with terrorism - with the strong insinuation that war may be a good option. Because that has worked so well, right?

Here was her interview from Tuesday afternoon on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd:

Todd: You heard us devolve in the conversation about okay now what, there is going to be a public policy response. We have the political response here. This is -- you could look at this incident and say this is a result of the success of the military campaign against ISIS in Raqqa. It's possible we may look at it that way. But there is going to be a demand to do something. What should that something be?

Pletka: That's an excellent question. The real problem that we talk a lot about in national security in the war on terrorism is the fact we don't have a strategy for what we do after we win in Raqqa.

Todd: Right.

Pletka: Or what to do in Iraq. what to do in Syria. Or what to do in Yemen. We have got two problems. We have got the problems in those countries with terrorists there who are waiting to come back. But we also have foreign fighters in all of those countries who are flowing back to Europe, the UK, France, Belgium, and of course they will flow back to the United States. it will require a lot of border security and lot of vigilance.

Todd: It's obvious our law enforcement system is working very well. This person didn't have any guns to him. It's eight people that died. Not thousands of people that died. On one hand we are having success at minimizing terrorist risks but we are not eliminating them?

Pletka: No, we are not. Sadly the problem for me is we have actually begun to tolerate these terrorist attacks. We don't talk about Orlando, and don't talk about it as a terrorist attack. We don't very often about what happened in San Bernardino, and that was a terrorist attack. We should be talking more about this. We shouldn't tolerate it. It should be intolerable to us and the only way we are going to end it is by having an actual strategy to end these groups once and for all.

Todd: What does that mean? It is infiltration? Is it our own version of propaganda to counter it? It seems that one thing ISIS is much better at than we are is on the social media propaganda end of things.

Pletka: Sure. Of course it's partly an ideological war and we were not good at that. We were excellent during the cold war. We are not doing it well anymore. In addition to that it means actually providing alternatives to people who turn to these groups for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with islamic extremist...who turn to them because they don't like the government they are living under, they don't receive protections, we are seeing that across Africa.

Let's see how war works out.

Ed. Note: No, Pletka does not come right out and call for war. But AEI is an conservative agitator for action, particularly against Iran, which would actually destabilize the region more than anything else.

We should also note that the person who committed the terrible crime in New York was Uzbek, and had been here since 2010. His radicalization happened HERE. Not there. Now what, Danielle?

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