Col. Tom Snodgrass
The National Security Advisor position requires a knowledgeable quarterback, but McMaster’s statements on Islam cast doubt his ability to be a ‘Tom Brady Super Bowl quarterback’
By Col. Tom Snodgrass (Ret.), Virginia Free Citizen
General H.R. McMaster Has Superb Tactical Battlefield Credentials, But His Unreal Perspective Of Islam Indicates More Obama-Kerry-Clinton Strategic Fumbling
H.R. McMaster The Man
Herbert Raymond “H. R.” McMaster graduated from West Point, earning his commission in 1984, and going on as a captain to command a cavalry troop of 8xM1A1 Abrams Tanks and 12xM3A2 Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicles at the 1991 Desert Storm Battle of 73 Easting (a north-south coordinate line on military maps) where his cavalry troop destroyed over eighty Iraqi Republican Guard tanks and other vehicles without a friendly loss. McMaster was awarded a Sliver Star for this impressive victory.
From 1994 to 1996 McMaster was a military history professor at West Point teaching the lessons of his battlefield experiences. Following his tour at West Point, McMaster earned a PhD in military history at the University of North Carolina; turning his PhD dissertation into a critically acclaimed history of the tragic U.S. strategic incompetence in the Vietnam War titled “Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.” Later McMaster graduated from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and also completed an Army War College research fellowship at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
As a colonel in 2004, McMaster was assigned command of an armor cavalry regiment with the daunting mission of subduing the virulent insurgency in Tal Afar, Iraq. It was in this assignment that McMaster directly confronted Islamic jihad up close and personal. Up to the time of McMaster’s arrival, the U.S. forces had been unsuccessful in quelling the insurgency. McMaster concluded the reason for the lack of success due was to the American doctrine of withdrawing from urban areas at night for the purpose of “force protection.” This withdrawal tactic opened the city up to the return of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) fighters each evening, while undermining the confidence of the Tal Afar’s majority Iraqi Sunni population in US staying power and commitment in the battle against AQI. As a result, the local Sunni Arabs were reluctant to provide intelligence to US forces for fear of retaliation and lack of confidence in US protection.
McMaster went against the prevailing Army force protection doctrine of the time and instead deployed his soldiers into Tal Afar on a permanent, round-the-clock basis, thus taking away the nightly insurgents’ dominance and winning the local population’s confidence and cooperation. With the newly gained sources of reliable intelligence, McMaster’s armor cavalry regiment was able to defeat the AQI insurgents. Subsequently, with the Tal Afar victory to his credit, McMaster joined General David Petraeus’ team as an advisor revising the Army’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual that eventually emphasized McMaster’s Tal Afar model of “nation-building” and relying on local Muslims to carry out the fight.
The Unique Circumstances Surrounding The Tal Afar Success
As with every military success, important local conditions play a huge role in the outcome of the battle. In the case of Tal Afar, there were two overriding factors that caused the Iraqi Sunni urban population to ally with McMaster and provide the information and cooperation that made the victory possible. The immediate pressing factor was that AQI was true to the Islamic creed and enforced draconian Sharia compliance in everyday life imposing a strict ban on alcohol, cursing, smoking and other acts deemed haram, or sinful. In some cases of mundane Sharia violations, the death penalty was invoked. While the Tal Afar Sunnis were practicing Muslims, they were not prepared for the AQI fundamentalist version of Sharia and accompanying death penalties. The Tal Afar Arabs eventually felt so oppressed by their Sunni coreligionists that they decided allying with the Americans was the only available way to liberate themselves from fellow Muslims who had stricter standards for Sharia enforcement than they could tolerate.
The second overriding factor that caused the Iraqi Sunni urban population to ally with McMaster was less immediately pressing, but contained an equally ominous prospect of subjection and religious oppression. However, in this case the potential oppressor was the Iraqi Shia government that, should the US forces prevail over AQI, could ride in on US coattails to establish the dominance of the Shia Sharia in Tal Afar. The US took advantage of this perennial Sunni-Shia sectarian hostility by offering the Tal Afar Sunnis the promise of the autonomy of their own “Sons of Iraq” armed militia if they allied with the US and subsequently entered into a coalition government with the Iraqi Shia as their junior partner.
The problem with basing the US strategy for fighting Islamic jihad on the Tal Afar and wider Iraqi counterinsurgency/nation-building “surge” model is that the chance of the above unique conditions being repeated is slim to none.
Unfortunately, to top it off President Barack Obama deserted the Iraqi Sunnis and reneged on America’s strategic promise to them when he precipitously and foolishly withdrew all US forces from Iraq in 2011, which foreseeably facilitated AQI to morph into the even more dangerous Islamic State. Obama completely squandered the successful results of thousands of US military dead and trillions of dollars expended to attain defeat of AQI to fulfill his foolish campaign promise to abandon Iraq, irrespective of the disastrous consequences that would result which were accurately forecast by President George W. Bush.
McMaster And His Flawed Obama-Kerry-Clinton Strategic Understanding Of Islam
Twice recently McMaster has repeated the Obama regime’s mantra that, essentially, “the Islamic State is not Islamic.”
On May 4, 2016, speaking before the Center for Strategic & International Studies McMaster stated: “groups like ISIL, who use this irreligious ideology, this perverted interpretation of religion to justify violence. They depend on ignorance, and the ability to recruit vulnerable segments of populations to foment hatred, and then use that hatred to justify violence against innocents.”
On 21, 2016, speaking to Virginia Military Institute, Center for Leadership and Excellence, McMaster declared: “we will defeat today’s enemies, including terrorist organizations like Daesh [Islamic State], who cynically use a perverted interpretation of religion to incite hatred and justify horrific cruelty against innocents.”
There is a fundamental question that Obama-Kerry-Clinton never answered after making the same fact-free pronouncements about Islam, and now McMaster has yet to address. To understand the question, first it is necessary to stipulate that the Quran, Hadith, and Sharia clearly state:
Quran: “And when the sacred months [four periods during the year when tribal warfare was forbidden by mutual tribal agreement on the Arabian Peninsula in Muhammad’s time] have passed, then kill the unbelievers wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush.” [9:5]
Quran: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day [Islamic final eschatological victory] and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger [Muhammad] have made unlawful [that is, do not practice Islamic Sharia jurisprudence] and who do not adopt the religion of truth [Islam] from those [Jews and Christians] who were given the Scripture [the Jewish and Christian Old & New Testaments] – fight until they give the jizya [Muslim extortion-submission tax on non-Muslims] willingly while they are humbled.” [9:29]
Hadith: “The Messenger of Allah [Mohammed] said: I have been commanded to fight against people till they testify that there is no god but Allah, that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” [Sahih Muslim (1:33)]
Sharia: “Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word ‘mujahada’ signifying warfare to establish the religion.” [Reliance of the Traveller o9.0 Jihad]
These scriptures are acknowledged by mainstream Islamic authority like Cairo’s Al-Hazar University to be authentic canonical foundation of Islam, so the fundamental question for Obama-Kerry-Clinton and McMaster is: Since the meaning of the Quran, Hadith, and Sharia scripture is clear, by what authority are they considered to be a “perverted interpretation” of Islam?
The basis of the Obama-Kerry-Clinton-McMaster approach to war is that “moderate Muslims” will renounce the Quran, Hadith, and Sharia canonical scripture that declares the foundational purpose is to impose Islamic law and religion on the entire world. Leaving aside the actual feasibility of achieving this Islamic foundational purpose, it has remained Islam’s aspirational organizing principle for 1400 years. Obama-Kerry-Clinton-McMaster claim this organizing principle has been nullified by some unnamed and unspecified authority, but of course it has not. So, Obama-Kerry-Clinton-McMaster buttress their anti-jihad strategy on the unfounded hope that Muslims will save the US from Islam by betraying Islam’s stated objective. Hope is not a strategy. One would expect that McMaster would have learned this lesson from writing “Dereliction of Duty.”
Conclusion
It is apparent to any clear-thinking individual that it is McMaster and his Obama regime predecessors that hold the perverted interpretation of Islam. Therefore, it is no wonder that the US has been so unsuccessful when the true nature of the Islamic enemy is so totally misunderstood. Sun Tzu summarized the reason for US lack of success correctly as follows:
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
The US needs a quarterback that understands our opponent.
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The post McMaster Has Military Experience For The NSA Job, But Lacks Understanding Of Islamic Religion appeared first on The Virginia Free Citizen.