The following is a letter to the editor from Dennis Galvin. Letters to the Editor do not necessarily reflect the views of WestfordCAT or its Board of Directors. To submit your own Letter to the Editor, e-mail asylvia@westfordcat.org
Fourteen years have passed since the worst terror attack on our soil. Three thousand people, including hundreds of firefighters and police officers died on September 11, 2001. What have we, as a nation, learned from the sorrow and suffering of that day?
We certainly haven’t learned anything about security! A fundamental principle is to secure your perimeter (e.g. protect your borders). After fourteen years nothing has been done to secure our southern border. Drugs, criminals and potential terrorist, hidden among a mass of poor and desperate migrants, pass undetected into our homeland every day. Another principle is access control. Instituting and adhering to measures that will ensure that only “suitable” persons enter our borders has also not materialized. Instead, our immigration regulations go unenforced, and despite the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, an adequately vetted “real identification” system for the nation has never been implemented.
Threat elimination is another fundamental concept. It means taking the fight to our enemies. We began to achieve this in Iraq and Afghanistan until 2009. President Obama pulled the pin on any initiatives by US troops to root out terrorist elements in those nations. Consequently, the Taliban has returned to Afghanistan, and a gang of cutthroats, known as ISIS, have emerged in the heart of the Middle East. Their stated goal is to destroy Israel first and then the United States. Their policy of terror is now destabilizing Europe as hundreds of thousands of refugees flee their brutality in Syria, and are now overwhelming Europe.
These failures can be attributed to a political school of thought, epitomized by President Obama, which views America as the problem not the solution for the world. Consequently, the Obama administration’s approach to the global threats we face is tentative and at times derelict. His approach has been inappropriate, ineffective and prone toward disaster. Obama caters to the “hard left’, whose world view has been historically marked by its disregard of the realities of the military balance of power and its influence on both our national security and foreign policy. The chaos playing out in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean is the end product of this. If this doesn’t change, we will find ourselves facing another September 11th and soon.
