“One day in the pavilion at Karakorum he [Genghis Kahn] asked an officer of the Mongol guard what, in all the world, could bring the greatest happiness.
‘The open steppe, a clear day, and a swift horse under you,’responded the officer after a little thought, ‘and a falcon on your wrist to start up hares.’
‘Nay,’responded the Kahn, ‘to crush your enemies, to see them fall at your feet -- to take their horses and goods and hear the lamentation of their women. That is best.’”
—Harold Lamb, Genghis Khan: The Emperor of all Men.
For Barack Hussein Obama, ISIS is an abstraction amenable to management. Obama’s only experience with men of violence is merely derivative and their acts of murder, their provocations to war are only viewed dispassionately from a flat screen television. The ivory tower of academe and the tinkling milieu of restaurants exclusive to the liberal aristocracy provide absolutely no relatable context for Obama. He is a man of delicacy and privilege. How can he understand the brutish reality, the dank stench of the bestial army of Jihad? They are animals driven mad by the lash of a rabid and feral cult of death.
While ISIS barbarians brandish their dull and brutish knives, Barack Obama contemplates the break of his new khakis atop his expensive golf shoes on the manicured back nine. Only the “optics” of his nonchalance give him pause. Brutality and death are not to be found on the putting green. Nor are they found within the cloistered walls of a multi-million dollar estate on Martha’s Vineyard. Our President is a spoiled playboy, too consumed by his narcism to give attention to presidential intelligence briefings collected despite mortal danger to intelligence operatives. He is openly taunted by “JV” desert thugs and while he gawks slack-jawed, they tear through flesh and bone until a grimaced head is rended from its corpse and dangled in triumph. This is brutal reality and it’s Obama’s shame.
Soon, we’ll hear from the dapper cicero with the golden teleprompter, but Obama will only dazzle with spectacular equivocation. It is a fore gone conclusion, Obama is an automaton following his progressive programming. The dynamism of foreign policy befuddles him because the intricacies of reality do not conform to his static, synthetic dogma. His plan for ISIS will not be muscular, but will consist of half measures designed to contain. But, a containment strategy for a movement impelled by such explosive hate will produce the same result as attempting to compress water in a closed cylinder. Eventually, the cylinder will rupture with catastrophic force. However, this isn't Obama's concern. Pragmatically, all he has to do is kick the can a bit further down the road. So, Obama will propose to manage the ISIS problem. It isn’t really our problem anyway.
Progressives like Obama are not adept at analysis because the analytical faculty is suppressed by indoctrination and left to atrophy throughout the process of “higher learning”; the progressive acolyte applies an artificial paradigm developed apart from real world experience. It is a construct manufactured in isolation from the lessons of history, the dictates of morality, or the accumulated experience of generations. Progressivism is a political abstraction.
Obama dithers because he has been programmed to expect a result that reality refuses to manifest. Despite applying the golden rule of progressivist foreign policy, an obsequious appeasement, he is not transformative in an environment where the rule of “might makes right” prevails. Among nations, it’s the will to power that makes the world go round. And, if America does not intimidate, the jackals feel bold to circle near.
Russia, China, North Korea, and the mad Jihadists are all on the march because Obama has withdrawn American influence from the great global chess game. It doesn’t matter that Obama doesn’t want to play the game, the other guys do. The evil empires don’t care about Obama’s pouting theory of Western Imperialism. Where our influence recedes the will to power consumes, expands, and consolidates.
Genghis Kahn knew all of these things. He was a man of the world, a warrior, a murderer, and eventually, lord of almost the entire world. Genghis Kahn, despite his obvious flaws, is in one way an example of what Obama should be, a man to be taken seriously. If Obama isn't taken seriously then American lives become fodder. When Obama vacillates in Syria, we all play the fool for it. When Obama responds to the beheading of an American journalist by delivering a tepid speech and returning seven minutes later to his golf game he puts a target on all of our backs. Obama’s weakness is America’s weakness. And, the newest bully on the block sees opportunity.
Obama’s plan for ISIS should be simple and direct. It should crystalize the objective of total victory—the extermination of a committed enemy. But, it won’t. Obama doesn’t see America as a force for good but rather as malevolent. He views our diminished influence as a net good. He does not understand that ISIS is not amenable to politics but only to power. His colossal naiveté does not recognize that the history of man is the conquest of power. Our President is an adolescent in a world of very serious men.
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