If we were casting for a Star Wars redux movie, Obama would be my pick for Vader, and JSOC would be his Death Star. He’d be perfect to lead us from the American Galactic Republic to the American Galactic Empire, where everyone lives in fear of reprisal at home and abroad. Public citizens emails and cell calls being stored away for future just-in-case-use and the good investigative journalists awakened in the night with threatening callers. I consider myself a part time journalist, and have had one such call myself during our investigative push into Benghazi.

Obama supporters cannot shirk away from the fact that he has killed more people than Bush in the Global War on Terror. To be fair, both Presidents have killed their way through target decks without any thought towards the long game of radical ideological prevention and stability as the end game. Obama inherited Bush’s war machine, but instead of holding it at bay, he’s unleashed it without reserve much to the shock and dismay of “Bama loyalists”.

Their combined efforts have created instability in the Middle East and North Africa on a scale previously unseen. The world is more dangerous today than it was on September 11th, 2001, and as Jeremy Scahill points out in Dirty Wars, “The World is A Battlefield.”

In hindsight, President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize seems more like a “dare” for peace by the Nobel Committee of five. We know now that he didn’t take the dare, and I’d like to see the looks on committee member’s faces, now that his prize is covered in the blood of the thousands of people official government reports call “collateral damage” to de-humanize the dead. The numbers don’t lie: 575 US troops died under Bush in Afghanistan, and over 1500 under Obama. The drone stats are very similar.

“I’ve been on dozens of video teleconference calls with the President, and when it comes to kill or capture, Obama says kill nearly every time.” -Former JSOC Operative

While I respect a Commander-in-Chief who can make hard life-or-death decisions, if we want to kill our way to peace then I suggest breaking out the nukes and just getting it over with. “Turn sand into glass,” I say. It works, totally dominate the enemy into submission like we did in the second World War with Japan. Game. Set. Match.

However, in today’s political climate, excluding Israel, a nuclear solution would make more long-term enemies for the US.  As a global society I believe we are striving to be better human beings when it comes to weapons of mass destruction.

So what do we do? We are faced with the reality that we are fighting a global war against a radical ideology that has no borders or rule books. We do need Special Operations Forces (SOF) for this kind of fight, and we need SOF allies, America can’t win this one alone, and we shouldn’t have to. Radical Jihad affects every free society on the planet.

We just need to get smarter about the way we are doing things, and admit that we can’t kill everybody. At some point we need to focus on removing the weeds for good, or else we’re in an endless process of elimination. Washington also needs to get their act together and put an end to interagency rivalries that exist between the alphabet soup agencies (CIA, FBI, State, NSA, etc.), and the lack of information sharing.

An example of this is that the FBI still, to our knowledge, has not been granted access to the Benghazi drone footage for their investigation. That video tells a story, and why would the FBI be kept out of the loop? The plot thickens. JSOC has been taking orders directly from the White House, and we’ve heard reports from CIA sources that claim JSOC has been assassinating bad guys in Libya however, some of these bad guys have been allegedly spying for the CIA. You can see the problems this creates when it comes to trusting America. Cooperate with us, and you might end up dead. Word spreads fast that you can’t trust America, friend one minute, and head on a stick the next.

Our current strategy is like sticking up for the small kid against the schoolyard bully. However, in the process of standing up to the bully you punch two other kids in the face. How are you going to be viewed in the schoolyard? Will the good kids want you back to stick up for them again, and risk a bloody nose or worse? Or would they be scared that this kind of diplomacy creates too much collateral damage?

You decide.

The JSOC Death Star was under construction during the Bush administration, and now Obama’s has taken command. Unfortunately, everything looks like the planet Alderaan, and a lot of Muslims are afraid their planet is next.