According to CNN.com and FoxNews.com, congressional lawmakers urged the Obama administration to crank up the offensive against the Islamic State after another video surfaced purporting to show the graphic execution of an American journalist.
Two weeks after American James Foley was beheaded by his Islamic State captors, the reports say, a video emerged Tuesday afternoon claiming to show freelance journalist Steven Sotloff being executed in the same way.
The White House and State Department said intelligence officials are working quickly to determine the video’s authenticity. If it is genuine, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, “We are sickened by this brutal act.”
“I am back Obama, and I am back because of your arrogant foreign policy towards the Islamic State,” the person in the video said.
The Roman Empire — previously a republic — fell apart gradually, over several centuries. Things happened a lot more slowly in those days, for obvious reasons. But the fall of the American republic, if it happens, may parallel that centuries-earlier event — only on a faster track.
The Roman Empire ultimately declined for reasons of strife within. Although the Roman empire was never a free republic to the extent that the United States has been, it was — at its peak — one of the more prosperous and free periods of human history to date, leaving aside ancient Greece and when compared to the religious dictatorships to follow.
Its decline and fall — brought about (in part) by internal corruption and government involvement in the lives and the economy of private citizens — resulted in the Dark and Middle Ages, an era where religious dictatorship and a supernaturalist approach to knowledge, life and values reigned supreme.
According to Edward Gibbon (author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), the end of that phase of civilization occurred over a period of a century-long invasions by violent, uncivilized tribes. One cannot help but think of America, the now seemingly helpless and pitiful giant who could annihilate its enemies — but never will, it seems — as presently enduring a fast-forward fall into decline of the scale that culminated in the end of the Roman empire.
Contrary to what Karl Marx and others ideologists of history have claimed (along with Freud, in his equivalent determinism involving human psychology), nothing is inevitable. Man has free will, residing in the choice to think and take action based on certain (rational or irrational) premises. We can change our course, both economically and foreign policy-wise, at any time.
At this crucial juncture in American history, the American republic is doing essentially everything wrong. We respond to our economic decline or stagflation with more of the same toxic policies — hampered market socialism — which created the mess in the first place; and we call it “change,” as if words can change what it really is. In Orwellian fashion, we label our economic stagnation and decline “hope,” as if placing a positive emotion on a poster or at a White House website could make it so.
This is the anti-intellectual, psychologically evasive context in which terrorists find us. Is it any wonder they choose to attack now, since attacking people at their weakest, and most feeble-minded, is what they do?
After years of negligent foreign policy, the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost. For decades, America has been mostly weak in the face of Islamic terrorism. Republican presidents call the militant sects — the modern equivalent (or worse) of the warring tribes who sacked Rome out of existence — a “religion of peace,” and apologize before sending troops in for a purpose never quite made clear. (That was the George W. Bush administration.) Obama takes this weakness and self-humiliation even further. His whole administration is one gigantic green light with the all-but-written words, “Attack us. We won’t do a thing.”
Looking at Islam rationally and psychologically, we could have predicted all this. Many like myself have been doing so, since 9/11 at least.
The principle of human nature here is simple: The more you appease or ignore a violent offender, the more confidence you give them to do what they want to do. The more you fail to respond, and the more you apologize when you do make feeble attempts at responding (as if only for show), the worse they will get. If we treated rapists and domestic killers like we conduct our foreign policy — walking on eggshells and turning cheeks left and right, pleading with violent criminals to please like us — our cities and countryside would have been overrun with death and destruction, by now.
What do you think the Muslim terrorists who do these things will think and feel when our State Department and President continue to claim that they’re “sickened,” yet do almost nothing to stop them with the power we have available? Talk is not merely cheap; it’s deadly when you do not mean a word of what you say. And Obama does not (except when he apologizes for what he considers his shameful nation.)
We all know Obama isn’t going to do a thing. He goes back and forth between an obvious reluctance to treat our enemies as enemies, and — on the other hand — tepid, token attempts to make it look like he’s at least doing something (drop a bomb here or there, throw in a drone). If anything is worse than doing nothing, Obama’s policy is it.
None of this is an insult to the American military. It’s an embarrassing travesty that they must answer to this man as a commander-in-chief. I suspect a lot of them feel this way, although they can’t say it aloud.
In a way, the real enemy is ourselves (most of us, anyway). Smart and self-confident people would not have leaders like this in the first place. Rational people can make the distinction between acts of aggression and acts of self-defense. I’m sick of it being considered war-mongering to simply demand self-defense for our citizens and the right of all of us to live in freedom.
Our own weakness from within is making us vulnerable to the sick and suicidal savages who have nothing to live for except the senseless destruction of others. If we had the moral confidence, and mental alertness, to tame our own government with all the outrageous things it does to our own individual and economic rights every day, that same government might have proven to be a better protector against these external threats than the hapless fools presently in Washington DC can ever hope to be.
The only honest elected official in Washington I know of, on this issue, is U.S. Senator Ted Cruz. About ISIS and Islamic nations he simply said, “Bomb them back to the Stone Age.”
Sooner or later we will have to do what we have to do; or start to endure a lot worse than these two shameless, public beheadings.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
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