Pentagon’s take on ISIS fight nothing like Canada’s campaign rhetoric

Contrast between measured and political language, the latter used to install fear and division:

The leaders of the Liberal and New Democratic parties, Stephen Harper tells his election rallies, are such a couple of timorous wet smacks that they can’t possibly be trusted to shield Canadians from the evil that constantly bears down upon us all.

“Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair are so wrapped up in some form of twisted form of political correctness that they won’t even call jihadist terrorism what it is,” Harper told cheering supporters in Sault Ste. Marie this month.

“If you cannot even bring yourself to call jihadist terrorism what it is, then you cannot be trusted to confront it, and you cannot be trusted to keep Canadians safe from it.”

So, to summarize, and I’m using the words of the prime minister here, ISIS is a barbaric, fanatic, radically violent bunch of jihadist terrorist murderers. And they threaten Canadians every single day. And fighting them begins with calling them all those things, and if you can’t call them those things, you aren’t a fighter.

Now, here are the words of Christine Wormuth, the under-secretary of defence at the Pentagon, in testimony to Congress last week:

“While not 10 feet tall,” she told the Senate armed services committee last week, ISIS “remains a thinking enemy that adapts to evolving conditions on the battlefield.”

Wormuth, of course, is not running for office, and it is her job to take a clear-eyed view of her adversary.

She is tasked by President Barack Obama to help lead the military offensive in which Canada has been a proud participant, to use Stephen Harper’s words again.

Wormuth and the two top American generals who flanked her in the hearings tried to focus on the coalition’s meagre gains, but couldn’t obscure the utterly bleak reality that has emerged in the year since Obama announced the offensive.

Just a few days earlier, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs, Gen. Martin Dempsey, described the situation as “tactically stalemated.”

Senator John McCain, former naval commander, chairman of the armed forces committee and easily the Republican party’s reigning expert on war, used more pungent language.

“It seems impossible to assert that ISIL is losing and that we are winning. And if you’re not winning in this kind of warfare, you are losing. . . It’s an abject failure.”

McCain, like Wormuth and the generals, didn’t bother with any of the jihadist-murderer-terrorist-barbaric-fanatic-radical references Stephen Harper says a leader must make in order to protect the nation.

Source: Pentagon’s take on ISIS fight nothing like Canada’s campaign rhetoric – Politics – CBC News