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“GOOD SHOT MR PRESIDENT”, former NBA star Alonzo Mourning (above right) seems to be saying to Barack Obama during a game of golf while the rest of the nation was mourning the beheading of journalist James Foley

The Arena with Hildegarde

How will Obama give credence to his words and not make people think that this is nothing but political rhetoric since his most recent actions have discredited that stealth resolve?

LEST you forget, today marks 13 years since the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York and the subsequent declaration of the “war on terror” by former United States president George W. Bush.

They have been 13 long years with so much happening between the protagonists on the war on terror – the US and its allies and the terrorist groups that have mushroomed since the Osama bin Laden-led terrorist group Al-Qaeda drew first blood on September 11, 2001.
Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama, has taken the war on terror to higher levels.

Thus terrorism is now a global phenomenon and all United Nations member states have been roped in the fight, one way or the other as the Al-Qaeda- affiliated groups and/or franchises are found on most of the continents: Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al-Shabaab in Somalia, Al-Nusra Front in Syria, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which is now known as the Islamic State.

At a time when some African states are reeling under the scourge of the deadly Ebola virus, the United States believes that ISIS poses the most serious national security threat and that it must be crushed.

However, when ISIS created an Islamic caliphate, they did not seem to pose serious threats to US interests since the Western media quickly adapted to using Islamic State rather than ISIS or ISIL.

It was as though ISIS had the right to carve out parts of Syria and Iraq and create a political and spiritual state, until they beheaded two captured American journalists – James Foley and Stephen Sotlof.

Last Wednesday, the United States leader vowed to “destroy and degrade” the group: “Our objective is to make sure that ISIL is not an ongoing threat to the region. And we can accomplish that. It’s going to take some time and its going to take some effort.

“As we have seen with Al-Qaeda, there are always going to be remnants that can cause havoc of any of these networks, in part because of the nature of terrorist activities. You get a few individuals and they may be able to carry out a terrorist act. But what we can do is to make sure that the kind of systemic and broad-based aggression … is degraded to the point where it is no longer the kind of factor that we’ve seen it being over the last several months.”

But the questions that beg answers are that the United States and its allies are conveniently ignoring the fact that in pursuit of their strategic interests they have given succour to the rise in terrorist activities.

A large number of the Al-Qaeda offshoots have at one point or the other received financial and material backing from the West. ISIS has managed to be where it is today thanks to the tonnes of military equipment that was supplied to Iraq when the war on terror started.

How will Obama give credence to his words and not make people think that this is nothing but political rhetoric since his most recent actions have discredited that stealth resolve.

When James Foley was beheaded by ISIS militants Obama came out guns blazing “One thing we can all agree on is a group like ISIL has no place in the 21st century” and that “there has to be a common effort to expel this cancer so it does not spread”.

Moments after the Press briefing, Obama reportedly went to play golf with former National Basketball Association player Alonzo Mourning (no pun intended).
The pictures that the media released were far from a president mourning the death of a US citizen, a president who had just spoken with the parents of the murdered journalist. People around the world were shocked by the duplicity and the fact that Obama had deliberately overwritten his message of compassion, just for the love of a game of golf.

People tweeted expressing their shock over Obama’s actions. Below are some of the tweets courtesy of the UK’s Daily Mail and other wires:
“Golfing today is in bad taste,” tweeted Vox editor-in-chief Ezra Klein, who is a long-time Obama supporter.

“What message does it send?” asked the Drudge Report editor and Washington Times columnist Joe Curl.
@MikeBatea wrote: “Regardless of heinous terrorist murders, #Obama vows to stay on course. The golf course.”

And David Horowitz @horowitz39 added: “Isis beheads Foley. Obama makes an empty statement and takes another round of golf. Is this an invitation to kill more Americans?”

@JaneJ0hns0n remarked: “Perhaps Obama would be more interested if Isis kidnapped his golf clubs.”
Joseph Curl @josephcurl asked: “What message does it send when the PotUS (President of the US) tells terrorists he’s outraged at the beheading of an American, and then heads to the golf course?”

While @IBDeditorials said: “Murdered ambassador. Beheaded American. Just what exactly would it take to keep Obama from a fund-raiser or off the golf course?”
It was only on Sunday that Obama admitted that “he had erred, not only in seeming detached but also in failing to consider the ‘optics’ associated with appearing callous and disinterested in the wake of that attack: “I should’ve anticipated the optics,” Obama said in an interview on NBC.

“But part of this job is also the theatre,” he said.
This theatre of the absurd becomes clear if we rewind the tape in the Obama presidency and his 2013 whirlwind African tour that ended in South Africa where he did an overkill of eulogies on the bedridden Nelson Mandela.

When Mandela died on December 5, 2013, Obama was one of the few world leaders to speak at the memorial service. But soon after delivering his message, an AFP photojournalist caught Obama “goofing” around with UK premier David Cameron and Danish premier Helle Thorning-Schmidt.

The “selfies” did not go down well with First Lady Michelle Obama, and neither did they impress a lot of other people who thought that he had erased his sincerity about Mandela in a short moment of having fun with friends.

Meanwhile, the war on terror takes centre stage today as it continues to reconfigure partnerships on the geopolitical sphere, with the past few months seeing what analysts believe is “the return to the Cold War era”.

The pronouncements at the just-ended Nato summit in Wales and the show of muscle including the never-ending imposition of sanctions against the Russian Federation were an indicator of how important this season has become to the United States of America.