The United States will never be able to stop terrorism as long as the Obama administration attempts to treat the attacks solely as a law enforcement matter, not as a struggle against an Islamic ideology that despises America's entire way of life, former ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton wrote in an opinion piece published by
Fox News.
If President Barack Obama continues, as he did with the Orlando attack, to omit any linkage between "the cold-blooded murders, the terrorists' ideology and the broader international threat that motivated the killer," Bolton said there will be no way to defeat the enemy. "When you see an act of war like this committed against us, don’t tell me about gun control, tell me about how we are going to defeat these people who are motivating terrorists" to act against the United States.
The former ambassador says that to destroy ISIS, America has to "defeat it militarily in the places where it exists… because as long as ISIS can maintain stable bases of operations, these terrorist attacks will continue."
But Bolton said a major problem is that Obama believes that "as bad as terrorist attacks are, American 'overreaction' is worse. In his view, the use of U.S. force risks increasing the problem rather than reducing it, making us much a part of the problem as the terrorist threat itself."
The consequence of this policy, Bolton said, is that instead of trying to destroy ISIS's control over the territory it now has, the Islamic State has spread around while Obama "fiddles around and pursues this lackadaisical policy."