Obama's War on the War on Terrorism

Remember the old days? Remember when the Obama administration was fighting the good fight—not against terrorism-- but against the war on terrorism. Or better, when Obama was making the world safe for terrorism.

A former Obama administration official, named David Asher, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last Thursday. He told the committee that the Obama administration dismantled the law enforcement units that were working to disrupt Iranian terrorism. That is, the terrorism promoted by the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

The story does not seem to have made it into the mainstream press. It comes from the Washington Free Beacon:

The Obama administration "systematically disbanded" law enforcement investigative units across the federal government focused on disrupting Iranian, Syrian, and Venezuelan terrorism financing networks out of concern the work could cause friction with Iranian officials and scuttle the nuclear deal with Iran, according to a former U.S. official who spent decades dismantling terrorist financial networks.

David Asher, who previously served as an adviser to Gen. John Allen at the Defense and State Departments, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee Thursday that top officials across several key law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the Obama administration "systematically disbanded" law enforcement activities targeting the terrorism financing operations of Iran, Hezbollah, and Venezuela in the lead-up to and during the nuclear negotiations with Tehran.

"Senior leadership, presiding, directing, and overseeing various sections [of these agencies] and portions of the U.S. intelligence community systematically disbanded any internal or external stakeholder action that threatened to derail the administration's policy agenda focused on Iran," he testified.

At the time America could have seriously damaged Hezbollah, one of the world’s most important terrorist organization. Yet, the Obama administration, afraid of hurting the delicate feelings of the mullahs in Tehran, chose not to do so:

The United States squandered the chance "at a very low financial cost" to take apart Hezbollah's finances, its global organization, and the Iran proxy's ability to "readily terrorize us, victimize us, and run a criminal network through our shores, inside our banking systems—and in partnership with the world's foremost drug cartels—target our state and society," he said.

"We lost much of the altitude we had gained in our global effort, and many aspects including key personnel, who were reassigned, budgets that were slashed—many key elements of the investigations that were underway were undermined," he said.

It is a rich irony that leading American foreign policy experts are bemoaning the fact that the Trump administration has organized dozens of Sunni Arab states and has led them to commit to fight terrorists. The same experts are gnashing their teeth over those Sunni nations, led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, that are boycotting the nation of Qatar, another leading state sponsor of terrorism, home base for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and close ally of Iran.