Is Obama's plan to love ISIS to death?
Just send all your friends images of LGBTs hugging on the steps of SCOTUS, tweet to #LoveWins, and voilà! We'll shame the Islamic State into surrender! A better ideology defeated the Nazis, and it can work again!
Who thinks such things are an effective foreign policy – some hippie Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep in 1968 and just woke up, or a former member of the Obama administration? You decide:
Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation. She served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011 and previously served as a senior advisor at the U.S. State Department.
We can take pride in the fact that the better ideology did win in World War II, at least in the West, though Allied arms had something more to do with it than mere happy thoughts, as Charles C.W. Cooke drily notes. The Jews at Auschwitz had a better ideology than the Nazis, but without guns, their ideology was impotent.
By some strange coincidence, Prof. Brooks’s former boss is possessed of the same notions: “Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas.” That was the president last Monday at the Pentagon. Are such beliefs a litmus test for appointment in this administration? There is the possibility that Obamaites actually believe such things.
As Prof. Brooks writes, "Tweet it. Shout it. Sing it."
Right on, sister!
Henry Percy is the nom de guerre of a writer in Arizona. He may be reached at saler.50d[at]gmail.com.