BARACK OBAMA AND ISIS’ “CONTAINMENT”: How Is That Working Out For Ya?
A key difference between Progressivism and Conservatism is this:
— For Progressives, ideology informs their ideas.
— For Conservatives, ideas inform their ideology.
Perhaps that’s how Barack Obama and his inner circle are able to review not only the recent attacks in Paris, but a host of other terrorist events, and conclude that the Islamic State is “contained”.
Containment in and of itself is an interesting strategy. During the Cold War, containment was often employed largely by left-leaning political leaders against the Soviet Union — the idea being to allow the USSR to persist in a certain circle without bothering the free world. Democrats favored a containment strategy against Saddam Hussein; allowing him to continue his mayhem inside Iraq provided he didn’t extend his tentacles to the world at large.
For such containment strategies to have succeeded, it would have been necessary for the Soviets and Saddam to have concurred with the notion of operating inside a predetermined box. Neither did. The USSR exported Marxism up until the point Ronald Reagan confronted and then won against them. Saddam told the world he agreed with containment, then promptly converted the UN’s Oil For Food program into a cesspool of corruption that aided and abetted his genocidal tendencies — and extended his tentacles outward, even into the United States where he attempted to assassinate a former US President.
The Islamic State hasn’t agreed to any form of containment. Nowhere in their rhetoric have they indicated that if the world just lets them cut a sliver of land out of Iraq and Syria they’ll be happy to persist without affecting outsiders. The Islamic State marries the militant brand of Islam that defined Al Qaeda with a desire to acquire territory thus creating the modern incarnation of the caliphate that existed before the era of the Ottoman Turks. Or in other words, containment doesn’t exist in Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s vocabulary.
Yet we are told by Barack Obama that the Islamic State is contained, even as Paris suffers the most severe terror attack in all French history. In a cynical sense, it’s tempting to ponder just what Obama thinks the Islamic State is contained within? Does he envision a broad box that encompasses western Europe? More likely, his ideology is informing his ideas.
Lacking real world coherence, awash in academia, Barack Obama and his inner circle are ideologically unable to admit that radicalized Islam poses any threat. By extension, Islamic State can’t be anything more than a rabble rousing bunch operating exclusively in Iraq and Syria. In Obama’s world, the flavor of terrorism we’ve endured over the past several decades represents oppressed people acting out in response to the sins inflicted by the west. Because of the things we’ve done, they had no choice but to respond in kind in the only ways they were able. Since we backed out of Iraq and Afghanistan, reduced our footprint, adopted a more conciliatory tone, and deployed Obama to give a handful of clever speeches, our alleged sins of the past were supposed to have been disconnected from present events.
When that’s the ideology that informs the ideas, no wonder Obama’s response to the Paris attacks includes the claim that the Islamic State is “contained”. That hardly appears the case. Not after what just happened in Paris.
To quote his third-term-Hillary, the Paris attacks were indeed “harrowing” — interesting that’s all she had to say about it.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barack_Obama_at_Las_Vegas_Presidential_
Forum.jpg
