US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan could not have been more wrong when speaking at the Atlantic Festival on September 29 now infamously said that “the Middle-East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” As many as 1200 Israeli Jews including infants and toddlers have been massacred by Hamas jihadists since October 7 and the casualty numbers are continuing to increase by the hours with more than 200 innocents being held captive by the Sunni Salafi group in underground tunnels of Gaza.
There are a number of direct inferences from this statement which should be red flags for nations facing Islamic jihadists on their doorsteps. First, over-reliance on technical and spatial intelligence will always lead to grief as highly radicalized societies like the Hamas-ruled Gaza are very secretive with total focus on the destruction of the enemy by all means. And this includes the butchery of babies and toddlers as well the geriatric community with religious brainwashing giving them clear-cut so-called military objectives. NSA Sullivan’s statement clearly shows that the US intelligence including the National Security Agency, rulers of the spatial intelligence world, had no clue about the impending invasion of medieval barbarian hordes in South Israel on October 7. Perhaps, after the US forces withdrawal from Iraq by highly overrated Barack Obama and the conquering of Kabul by equally medieval Taliban in 2021, the US intelligence had taken its eyes off the ball in the Middle East after back-slapping itself for the détente between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Clearly, human intelligence in the West Bank and Gaza would have paid more dividends but the famed and much-written about Israeli intelligence was found complacent and wanting in achieving key result objectives.
The inability of Western intelligence to read the calm before the terror tsunami in South Israel is also due to confused political leadership in the US and Israel where both the leaders were fighting within for their survival rather than focusing on the incoming threats. Israel had five general elections in three years with the public still not providing a decisive mandate to the incumbent, who is fighting the Knesset for day-to-day survival. Similar confusion has prevailed in the US over Joe Biden’s migration policies and the increasing pressure from left-of-center politicians within his own Democratic Party. And the recipe for disaster was completed with the “Woke” liberal movement sweeping the democratic world.
{{/usCountry}}The inability of Western intelligence to read the calm before the terror tsunami in South Israel is also due to confused political leadership in the US and Israel where both the leaders were fighting within for their survival rather than focusing on the incoming threats. Israel had five general elections in three years with the public still not providing a decisive mandate to the incumbent, who is fighting the Knesset for day-to-day survival. Similar confusion has prevailed in the US over Joe Biden’s migration policies and the increasing pressure from left-of-center politicians within his own Democratic Party. And the recipe for disaster was completed with the “Woke” liberal movement sweeping the democratic world.
{{/usCountry}}With Israel now fighting on its southern and northern front and the threat of totally radicalized Iran looming over the horizon, the world is on a cliffhanger as all signs of an impending massive conflagration are there. The religious extremists are driving the agenda in the Middle East and the moderates within the Islamic world are maintaining silence as usual or else they will also be targeted. The hypocrisy of so-called social media influencers in the Islamic world to call out and condemn the massacre by Hamas of innocent Israeli Jews is also quite evident. However, the industrial scale of killings of innocent non-combatants done by Hamas terrorists at the behest of Iran will ensure that Israel will not stop till its vengeance is complete. This means that the world is on a short fuse for the coming years.
Given that the UN hardly has any credibility left in preventing conflicts and terror strikes all over the world, it is high time that the democratic world formed a counter-terror alliance with teeth and muscle to take on the jihadists all over the world. Rather than debating on the international convention on terrorism in an irrelevant and ineffective UN, victims of terror strikes need to come together, pool intelligence resources and pledge material support to take on the barbarians. The sooner these steps are taken the better as the brutal success of Hamas strike will encourage their ilk the world over to take on their enemies for their own objectives using religion for political power. Presently, the real terror threat is from the weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), Chinese and Turkish versions of which are available at cheap rates. One more terror strike and the world will go over the edge.