The ISIS Adviser By JAMES TARANTO

[mystery-ak]

http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-isis-adviser-1410806883

The ISIS Adviser
Obama entertains a bizarre hypothetical.

By JAMES TARANTO
September 15, 2014

He's a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, a better political director than his political director, and to hear President Obama tell it--or, to be precise, to hear the New York Times retell others' retelling of Obama's telling it--he's a better terrorist than the terrorists:

If he had been "an adviser to ISIS," Mr. Obama added, he would not have killed the hostages but released them and pinned notes on their chests saying, "Stay out of here; this is none of your business." Such a move, he speculated, might have undercut support for military intervention.

continued....

[massadvj]

Except that the purpose of beheading the prisoners was to draw the Americans and British into the war, and recruit all the young jihadis around the world to come to Syria to fight the evil invaders.

[truth_seeker]

As kids, we worried a bit about nuclear world war. My town had a Nike missile base. We did drills to "duck and cover," beneath the desk.

Then along comes bloody Vietnam, the draft, but eventually the end of Vietnam, the end of the Cold War, and the Peace Dividend.

Now kids can get scared about a billion or more swarming jihadis come to cut their heads off.

I'm somehow not reassured that my President treats it like a police problem. At the end of WWII we could discern the actions, which would be certain to prevent the same people from rising up and doing it again.

And we stayed and "occupied" them whether they agreed or not. Now less than 70 years later, we have forgotten most of what we learned then.

At the end of WWII Americans were "adults" who had sound judgment. Ask them if they like the idea of occupying Germany to prevent WWIII, they'd say okay.

Today asked the same question, Americans would ask "where is the free lunch, where are the video games, where is the rap music?"