{"id":81888,"date":"2015-12-10T17:23:57","date_gmt":"2015-12-11T01:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=81888"},"modified":"2015-12-10T18:53:02","modified_gmt":"2015-12-11T02:53:02","slug":"how-obama-thinks-about-terrorism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=81888","title":{"rendered":"How Obama Thinks About Terrorism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Beinart writes<\/a>: At the core of Barack Obama\u2019s terrorism speech on Sunday night lay a contradiction. He gave the address to convince an increasingly fearful nation that he takes the terrorist threat seriously. But he doesn\u2019t, at least not in the way his political opponents do.<\/p>\n

For George W. Bush, the fight against jihadist terrorism was World War III. In his speech to Congress nine days after 9\/11, Bush called al-Qaeda \u201cthe heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century … they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism.\u201d Many Republicans still see the \u201cwar on terror\u201d in these epic terms. After the Paris attacks, Marco Rubio didn\u2019t merely warn that the Islamic State might take over Iraq, Syria, and other parts of the Middle East. He warned that it might take over the United States. America, he argued, is at war with people who \u201cliterally want to overthrow our society and replace it with their radical Sunni Islamic view of the future.\u201d In his telling, the United States and \u201cradical Islam\u201d are virtual equals, pitted in a \u201ccivilizational conflict\u201d that \u201ceither they win or we win.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama thinks that\u2019s absurd. Unlike Rubio, he considers violent jihadism a small, toxic strain within Islamic civilization, not a civilization itself. And unlike Bush, he doesn\u2019t consider it a serious ideological competitor. In the 1930s, when fascism and communism were at their ideological height, many believed they could produce higher living standards for ordinary people than democratic capitalist societies that were prone to devastating cycles of boom and bust. No one believes that about \u201cradical Islam\u201d today. In Obama\u2019s view, I suspect, democratic capitalism\u2019s real ideological adversary is not the \u201cradical Islam\u201d of ISIS. It\u2019s the authoritarian, state-managed capitalism of China.<\/p>\n

While Republicans think ISIS is strong and growing stronger, Obama thinks it\u2019s weak and growing weaker. \u201cTerrorists,\u201d he declared on Sunday, now \u201cturn to less complicated acts of violence like the mass shootings that are all too common in our society.\u201d In other words, the Islamic State probably can\u2019t do anything to America that we Americans aren\u2019t doing to ourselves all the time, and now largely take for granted.<\/p>\n

Obama also argued that the Islamic State is losing in the Middle East, where the \u201cstrategy that we are using now\u2014air strikes, special forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country\u201d will produce a \u201csustainable victory.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"obama\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Beinart writes: At the core of Barack Obama\u2019s terrorism speech on Sunday night lay a contradiction. He gave the address to convince an increasingly fearful nation that he takes the terrorist threat seriously. But he doesn\u2019t, at least not … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1569,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-islam"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81888"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81897,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81888\/revisions\/81897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}