Observing in his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "When ISIS Rapists Win" that the Islamic State "fills the vacuum left by decaying nationalist ideologies," David Brooks concludes:
"So far the response to ISIS has been pathetic. The U.S. pledged $500 million to train and equip Syrian moderates, hoping to create 15,000 fighters. After three years we turned out a grand total of 60 fighters, of whom a third were immediately captured.
It’s time to stop underestimating this force as some group of self-discrediting madmen. ISIS is a moral and political threat to the fragile and ugly stability that exists in what’s left in the Middle East. ISIS will thrive and spread its ideas for as long as it has its land.
We are looking into a future with a resurgent Iran, a contagious ISIS and a collapsing state order. If this isn’t a cause for alarm and reappraisal, I don’t know what is."
A "contagious ISIS"? A pity the president isn't being informed of this. As reported in a Daily Beast article entitled "Spies: Obama’s Brass Pressured Us to Downplay ISIS Threat" by Shane Harris and Nancy A. Youssef:
"Senior military and intelligence officials have inappropriately pressured U.S. terrorism analysts to alter their assessments about the strength of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, three sources familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast. Analysts have been pushed to portray the group as weaker than the analysts believe it actually is, according to these sources, and to paint an overly rosy picture about how well the U.S.-led effort to defeat the group is going."
Be that as it may, maybe Nobel winner Obama should cut a multi-billion dollar peace deal with ISIS, in the hope that they will also discover reason and civility within 15 years? Yeah, right!
More important, what about "a resurgent Iran"? Obama went on record on December 29, 2014, as saying that Iran could become "a very successful regional power." Meanwhile, however, the mullahs continue to hang gay men; stone to death women accused of adultery; oppress Baha'is, Kurds, Christians and Sunni Muslims; threaten Israel with annihilation; arm Hamas and Hezbollah; and execute poets accused of "waging war on God."
ISIS is a curse on humanity, and so is Iran in equal measure, but what Obama decides not to see cannot hurt him.
David Brooks is so clueless about 'national identity'.
ReplyDeleteThe far left, e.g. Code Pink, does not believe in borders or nationalism, yearning for a de-industrialized carbon-free transgendered utopia free of religious zealots.
Failed government does not mean failed national identity.
People will always allow whoever has the guns, and collects the garbage, to 'rule'.
Mr. Brooks needs a course in Political Islam, or at least a copy of Ibn Battuta's 14th century travel memoir through the world of Islam, to get a clue about 'caliphates' and empires.
Made the mistake of actually reading the NYT on how the Iran deal is dividing American Jewry before this Brooks' musing about utopia, regularly invoking "News From Nowhere" even if he has never read William Morris' [Radical Socialist] response to Bellamy's [machines end work] "Looking Backward".
Iran hopes to recreate their Persian Empire, an iteration on the Caliphate. ISIS thinks they are the Taliban on steroids.
No more postmodernists in the WH, or the pages of the NYT!
SecDef Ashton Carter got his education correct: Medieval History + Nuclear Physics. Last night, I wondered what if ... the Crusaders had had nuclear-tipped arrows for their cross-bows....
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