OPINION:
Barack Obama is an intelligent fellow. Smart, sometimes. But for a smart, intelligent man, clever enough to get himself elected president of the United States not once but twice, he has a fifth-grader’s understanding of the evil men out there determined to kill us.
He talked the other day about the Islamic State, or ISIS, and how he thinks the United States and the West ought to deal with this gang of cutthroats emerging from an earlier millennium, like a primitive tribe emerging from the jungle with clubs and stones, ready to take on the world.
He seems to have new respect for the Islamic State. Not so long ago he sneered at it, like a little boy in short pants standing with his father to confront a ghost in his bedroom, as “the junior varsity.” He vowed to destroy them, showing them all the mercy that men who crucify children deserve.
Now he has stepped back and looked at them again, and concludes that maybe they’re worthy warriors with ideas — bad ideas, to be sure, but warriors with ideas that can only be defeated with better ideas. “This is not simply a military effort,” he said. “Ideologies are not defeated by guns. They’re defeated by better ideas.” Lest anyone miss his point, he said America and the West “will never be at war with Islam.” We can all pray that is true.
Mr. Obama, as he approaches the final months of his presidency, sounds weary of the struggle, and weary under the mantle of the leader of the West that every president must wear. Two years ago Mr. Obama, in a speech to a military and political audience at the White House, said the United States could not wage “a boundless war on terror,” and must adjust to “a new reality” of a threat merely from regional jihadists and domestic extremists.
“Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” he said on that occasion, “but this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”
He was wrong then, and he is wrong now. Democracy demands more than brave words with no particular resolve to back them up, and history advises in no uncertain tongue that democracies forget this to their mortal peril. Weariness is not available to free men. Giving in and giving up has no power to intimidate the nation’s enemies nor the light to inspire the men and women he took an oath (twice) to lead.
How very different Mr. Obama’s words of war weariness are from the power and strength of the inaugural address of John F. Kennedy. “Let every nation know,” the young president spoke into an icy wind on a January day more than a half century ago, “whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
The barbarians who Mr. Obama says distort and malign Islam in their pursuit of jihad, hear the words, too, and measure the resolve of America, the hated and once feared “infidel” nation, to live up to them. If Mr. Obama thinks America shares his war weariness it’s his responsibility to do something about it. But he’s wrong about that, too. America continues to be, in John F. Kennedy’s stirring poetry, the faithful “watchman on the wall.” It has no choice.
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