In politics, optics – the look of something and the press it generates – sometimes, no, often matter more than policy. And on Sunday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., described the optics of Obama’s decision to continue planned state visits to Cuba and Argentina after Tuesday’s terrorist attacks in Brussels as pretty darn bad.
On “Fox News Sunday,” Nunes described Obama’s time in Cuba as “hanging out. . .with a known financier of terrorism.” Nunes implied that the president’s time might have been better spent last week focused on rooting out terrorist cells around the world. He also described these cells in language typically reserved for the coordinated efforts of nation states to create empires. Nunes said the cells have effectively established “colonies” for terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, and al-Qaida in Africa, Asia and Europe.
Here’s the key part of what Nunes said from a show transcript:
So what needs to happen here is that the Obama administration submitted their strategy to the United States Congress which was a seven page strategy on defeating what they call extremism.
First of all, you have to define the problem. And so, look, I think it’s fair whether people say, what is your strategy? Well, look, the president of the United States should not be hanging out in Cuba with a known financier of terrorism.
What the president of the United States should be doing is calling together all our allies in a coalition of the willing, including those in the Middle East that want to sit down together as leaders at a neutral location, put all the intelligence on the table so that we can find out where all the pockets of ISIS and al Qaida are. Because remember, we have colonies now that have spread from Western Africa, all the way to Southeast Asia and now it looks like they have a command and control structure in parts of Europe.
So, what the president should be doing is sitting down with these leaders, identifying the problem, and then coming up with a plan and asking all the countries to participate more than they ever have in what is really going to be a long war, a generational war against radical Islamic extremism.
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In 1982, Cuba earned a slot on the shortlist of nations the United States officially considers as having financed terrorist activity. Cuba helped to finance leftist political movements – some of them militarized and violent – in Latin America during the 1980s.
In May, the Obama administration removed Cuba from the list, one step in a larger effort to normalize relations between the United States and the island nation. Only three countries remain on the current U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism: Iran, placed on the list in 1984; Sudan, placed on the list in 1993; and Syria, which has been included since 1979.
