This is a way to lose a war –

Stephen Brown writes at Front Page:

It makes one wonder how the West is ever going to win the war against radical Islam. …

Three navy SEALs have been charged for allegedly abusing a terrorist leader they had captured in Iraq last September.

The SEALs’ long-sought target, Ahmed Hashim Abed, is believed to have been the mastermind behind one of the most infamous incidents of the Iraq war: the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater security personnel in Fallujah in 2004. The four men were attacked when transporting supplies and had their bodies burned and dragged through the streets. Two of the corpses were then hung from a Euphrates River bridge.

Abed, the alleged planner of this barbarism, claims the navy’s elite commandos had punched him after his capture and that “he had the bloody lip to prove it.”…

Most right-thinking people would feel that, in the middle of a war, three such brave and highly-skilled warfare specialists, whose expensive training the American taxpayer has funded, should not be facing a demoralizing criminal trial over such a relatively minor matter that may not even have happened.

As far as legality is concerned, terrorists like Abed are lucky to be left among the living after their capture. As conservative columnist Thomas Sowell rightly points out, Islamic terrorists have never followed the Geneva Convention regarding the rules of warfare, as can be easily discerned in the case of the Blackwater security guards alone. More importantly, however, the terrorists themselves are not covered by the Convention’s provisions.

“Neither the Constitution of the United states nor the Geneva Convention gives rights to terrorists who operate outside the law,” writes Sowell.

Legally, under the Convention’s terms, the American military in wartime has the right to shoot any captured enemy not in uniform. Sowell states, “There was a time when everyone understood this” and cites World War Two’s Battle of the Bulge as an example. German troops caught in American uniforms during that battle were shot almost immediately and without trial. Their executions were even filmed and shown years later on American television with no fuss ever made regarding legality.

But in the charges against the three Navy SEALs, one can detect the liberal media’s invisible hand. After the media-induced hysteria about the Abu Ghraib scandal, where American service personnel were rightly punished for subjecting detainees to abuse, some of it no worse than frat party pranks, the American military is supersensitive about the treatment of detainees. It knows the liberal media would love another prisoner mistreatment scandal that can sell papers or earn networks higher ratings as well as simultaneously be used as a stick to beat an American institution it has never liked.

And it is not as if liberals in the media have ever actually cared about Iraqi prisoners. Just the opposite. For 24 years they hypocritically ignored the real suffering of the thousands of people who were tortured and murdered under Saddam Hussein in Abu Ghraib. But that did not stop them from blowing up the scandal involving the American military into something that appeared to merit a second Nuremburg Trials.

This need for scandal that can be turned into a headline, however, has been of greater service to the Islamists in Afghanistan. There, the controversy about civilian deaths caused by American and NATO troops led to a change in their Rules of Engagement (ROE) this year. It is now much more difficult for western forces to drop smart bombs or missiles on targets where civilians may be present. One report states lawyers now have to be consulted and a casualty analysis made before every smart bomb or missile attack. …

Due to the ROE change, one military publication states the Taliban are making greater use of human shields. Taliban fighters spend time in villages or compounds where civilians are present and also bring civilians, whether willing or unwilling, with them as human shields when they go on operations. This has led to their avoiding attacks, in which they earlier would have been killed.

And with the fight becoming more difficult and dangerous for American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, this can only spell bad news.

 Dr Laurie Roth found out what really happened when Captain Richard Phillips was finally rescued. She writes with some anger in Canada Free Press:

First of all, President Obama wouldn’t authorize the DEVGRU/NSWC SEAL teams to even go to the scene for 36 hours.  This by the way was going against the scene commander’s recommendation.  Of course, Obama, with his vast military experience knew much more!

The first time Capt. Phillips jumped in the water the SEALS had the pirate thugs all sited in but could not fire due to ROE restriction.

Just when your stomach starts turning green it gets worse!

When the navy Rubber boat was fired upon as it approached with supplies, they were not allowed to return fire due to the ROE restrictions.  Can we say mentally ill yet?

President Obama in his vast brilliance with Pirate and military situations denied two rescue plans developed by the Bainbridge CPN and SEAL teams.

Finally, days into this the Bainbridge CPN and SEAL team CDR finally had had enough and decided they had the authority to determine risk to hostage and fire if need be.  4 hours later it was done.  3 Muslim Somali Pirates were dead and 1 pirate,Wali-I-Musi was captured.  Miraculously and 5 days later Capt. Phillips was rescued. 

What is the bottom line?

If Obama had kept his nose out of this and let the SEALS do what they wanted to and could do, this would have been handled and concluded well in a few hours not 5 days!

Notice the media barely mentions that the Somali pirates were young, fundamentalist Muslims on a Jihad mission.  They were all 16-19 years old.  I can just see the media and some in this administration getting their knickers in a twist calling out such rash, violent responses to such young impressionable people. 

The only part in this drama that should have changed, now that we know the Pirates were such young men, was that Obama should have stayed out of this and the Pirate, Islamic thugs should have been killed within the first few hour by the SEALS.

You couldn’t help but notice the huge celebratory response of success from Obama and his administration, marking it as a huge success and victory.  That would be fine if it was true.  There was a great and miraculous victory all right…….in spite of Obama and his politically correct delays.

A final thought to the politically correct morons who apparently want people to die on the high seas…..why can’t all cargo ships, cruise ships and business ships of all sizes be heavily armed if Muslim terrorists are on a roll attacking ships, stealing and killing around the Horn of Africa?

 We share Mark Steyn’s admiration of the SEALs:

Amid all the relief for the rescue of Captain Phillips, we shouldn’t overlook the SEALs’skill and economy:

The snipers could see two pirates peering out from the back of the enclosed lifeboat and the third pointing his assault rifle at Phillips. President Barack Obama had cleared them to shoot if the captain faced imminent threat of death.

When the order came to shoot, former SEALs said, the hard part was not the distance – about 75 feet, an easy range for an experienced sniper.

The biggest risk came from the many moving parts: the bobbing lifeboat, the rolling ship, hitting three targets simultaneously in darkness.

With deadly accuracy, the snipers fired their rifles in unison. They killed the pirates with exactly three shots.

Amazing.

It’s easy to take the performance of a professional military for granted, as we do every week in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. But their technical skill has to improve almost in inverse proportion to the faintheartedness of offensive strategy from the political class. When you are, as with piracy and jihad and much else, essentially in permanent reactive mode, your reactions have to be brilliant, every time. Off the Somali coast, they were. But at some point we need a plan for the game.