ANALYSIS/OPINION:

I’ve written many times that you can’t listen to the words of this administration when it discusses defending America and confronting terrorism. You have to look at the consequences of its policies and actions.

Russia’s defense ministry on Saturday accused the United States of turning a blind eye to the trafficking of oil into Turkey from Syrian areas under Islamic State control after Washington called the amounts involved insignificant.

“When US officials say they don’t see how the terrorists’ oil is smuggled to Turkey … it smells badly of a desire to cover up these acts,” the ministry said on its Facebook page.

I’m very aware of Russian propaganda and its penchant for manipulating the news cycle to their advantage. However, consider the following statement, AFP reports, U.S. special envoy and coordinator for international energy affairs, Amos Hochstein, on Friday said the amount of oil smuggled into Turkey from areas of Syria controlled by the Islamic State group is “of no significance from a volume perspective — both volume of oil and volume of revenue”.

That doesn’t sound like a statement to me that smuggling is not happening. It sounds like an excuse. However, turning a blind eye to ISIS smuggling oil into Turkey is peanuts compared to allowing the Islamic State to produce and distribute oil over the last fourteen months, earning millions of dollars a month in the process. The White House says it did not start targeting ISIS oil infrastructure until recently due to environmental and collateral damage concerns. The real reason American forces were finally ordered to start destroying fuel trucks was the fact that Russia embarrassed them into doing so. Frankly, the whole White House narrative is incomprehensible. Therefore the American government is complicit in whatever consequences accrue from ISIS being able to grow, expand, and extend its reach across the world, threatening our way of life. The lack of American air pressure on the ISIS oil transportation and production network was the equivalent of a no-fly zone for the ISIS money machine.

The European Parliament just issued a report that ISIS has now brought materials and expertise into Europe to build and deploy weapons of mass destruction. An attack of this type would be devastating for the West and our way of life. Now that would be some real collateral damage. Not bad for the junior varsity.

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