The Islamic State is a nasty group of people who do nasty things that certainly should come to a stop. The Islamic State forces conversion to Islam, wages civil war, and cuts people’s heads off. The Islamic State’s behavior is inexcusable.
The Obama Administration wants to put a stop to the Islamic State, and has launched a new war in order to do it. The new war is just weeks old, but has already included bombings by the United States in both Iraq and Syria. In those American bombings, children and other innocent civilians are being killed.
These killings are clearly bad things, and they’re just the latest addition to a long record of American atrocities in Iraq, including the Abu Ghraib torture prison, shootings of civilians by American mercenaries, and the mutilation of corpses by American soldiers.
If the USA is establishing, with this new war, the moral standard that atrocities are an acceptable justification for bombings, then how can we object to bombings in the United States by angry Syrians and Iraqis?
Barack Obama has embraced the crude moral vision of George W. Bush, arguing that
“The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force.” In doing so, Obama has demonstrated that he shares the mentality of the Islamic State, in that he is unwilling to comprehend the validity of any language other than force himself.
We’ve been through this before. In he first decade of this century, American fighters battled against Islamic fighters int the streets of Iraq. We claimed victory over them, but in beating them back, we only inspired a new generation to violence.
Can we not break the cycle, acknowledging that deadly violence is wrong, regardless of who does it? Can we not, at long last, learn to speak another language besides the language of force?