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Yesterday Would Have Been Better, But Now’s Fine
The most basic duties of a nation state are to protect its citizens from foreign violence and — when failing at that — to ensure that those who commit violence against it are seen to have made a grievous mistake.
For fourteen months, the Islamic State been allowed to get away with humiliating a military we spent over a decade — and countless billions — training. It has, moreover, done so despite our government’s explicit promise to defeat it, while encouraging and orchestrating domestic violence in the West. As noted in this morning’s Morning Jolt, it’s been a lot more success than failure of late, and there are dead Americans on three continents to prove it.
If we want to destroy ISIS, we can destroy ISIS. Perhaps I am stating the obvious, but I want to state it anyway. Why? Because I am not hearing it enough.
Why exactly do the Democrat candidates for President choke like they have a chicken bone in their throats when asked to say those words? John Dickerson asked Hillary Clinton during Saturday night’s debate whether she agreed with various Republican politicians, and for that matter French President Hollande, that we are at war with radical Islam. Her response was to stumble about and ultimately insist that we were not at war “with all of Islam.” This was distinctly off the point of the question and illustrated yet again the fetish with words that the left has any time race, culture, or ethnicity sneak into the conversation.
That’s what I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around for the last five days. Stipulating that things are still in flux and that we may be getting some more answers soon, I sense that it’s an important and relevant question how three suicide bombers — three! — recruited into an otherwise competent terrorist cell could have been so spectacularly incompetent as to kill only one other person.
And in doing so, I’ll also answer Robert Lux. But I’d like to ask all of Ricochet if we — all of us, me included, and me especially — have this conversation in a way of which Ricochet can be proud. These are deeply emotional issues. They should be.
I don’t like writing on this topic. The coming season represents a celebration about a child whose very existence came under intense political pressure and violence within two years of his birth. Had it not been for the fact that His parents managed to flee as refugees into Egypt until His enemy was dead, we would never have heard of the man who would later be called Jesus Christ. History would have been very different, and the world would have been at a loss incomprehensible. No serious Christian can forget this.