A central lesson of the disastrous Iraq War is that one job of a post-9/11 president is to calm fears, not feed them. Some of us voted for Barack Obama thinking he would do that, and help restore reason to foreign policy discourse. For a while it looked like we were right. Now it looks like we weren’t.
He suggests that the threat to the U.S. from ISIS is exaggerated. Here are some reasons to agree:
1. The threat from Saddam Hussein was exaggerated.
2. It is in the interest of government officials to exaggerate (at least some) threats in order to expand their power.
The alternative view is that the threat has been minimized. Some reasons to agree are:
1. We have been way too optimistic that civilized values will prevail in that part of the world.
2. We have been reluctant to hold Muslims to our standards of civilized behavior. It could be that this “soft bigotry of low expectations” comes from a deep-down instinct that predicts a lot of uncivilized behavior.
I could argue either side of this issue.
I agree with all four of your subpoints! Not that I am an expert on these matters.
I suspect that U.S. presidents areinundated with talk about foreign policy, and they rightly don’t feel equipped to make strong stands on these things themselves. So they go along with whatever they are told by the military, by intelligence, by their ambassadors.
After that, they do what they really are good at: they rationalize it using whatever their favorite symbols.
As a particular example, I never thought Obama would be particularly pacifist, and I find it unsettling when I see otherwise smart people getting teary eyed about an American president. It’s impressive how well politicians can manipulate the symbols that people believe in–even people that ought to know better. Obama has if anything upped the bullying that Washington does, both at home and abroad. He increased the drone bombings immediately, and last I checked, he has done nothing to decrease them.
Personally, I think the direct threat of Hussein was exaggerated, but I am unclear why people consider it an unmitigated bad that the government has a democratic government led by the dominant religious sect, and that they are trading again with the rest of the world. These are all very good things in the long run.
To contrast, Iraq under Sunni leadership seems destined for some form of misery or another. Think of the American Civil War, but imagine that Lincoln was favored by 20% of the country instead of the 50% he had in actual history. If it was a mistake to oust Sadam Hussein, I have not yet seen a clear explanation of why.
Being kicked out of Al Qaeda for being too mean is saying something. But what does it say about Al Qaeda?
Politicians who start wars get a huge popularity boost. Thus, you’d expect them to blow all threats way out of proportion in hopes of goading the country into war. War might be bad, but that’s irrelevant.
On another note, I don’t think it’s bigotry to say that most people in the Middle East have a vastly different view of what is civilized than people in the West. Do you think apostasy should be punishable by death? http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/
1. We have been way too optimistic that civilized values will prevail in that part of the world.
2. We have been reluctant to hold Muslims to our standards of civilized behavior. It could be that this “soft bigotry of low expectations” comes from a deep-down instinct that predicts a lot of uncivilized behavior.
Those can both be true, but I’m not sure I see how either one supports ISIS as a threat to the US. Somalia is full of uncivilized people and behavior, but this matters little to US citizens except insofar as the US Government resettles large numbers of them in places like Minneapolis and Omaha. Likewise, if ISIL stays in the “IL” part of that acronym, I’m not sure what they do really bothers me that much.