Am I smarter than President Obama? I don’t think so…

In his his Sept. 24 speech to the UN general assembly, President Obama said,

As an international community, we must meet this challenge [of religiously motivated fanatics] with a focus on four areas. First, the terrorist group known as ISIL must be degraded, and ultimately destroyed.

A couple of minutes later, he followed this up with:

the future belongs to those who build – not those who destroy.

Apparently, according to his own words, Obama doesn’t think the future belongs to America. And perhaps he’s right. As Jesus said, “all who draw the sword will die by the sword,” because the final thing the destroyers destroy is themselves.

Let’s get something straight: ISIS didn’t behead civilians and then post videos of the killings online because they thought it would deter America and other coalition members from going to war against them. They did it because they knew it was precisely the type of behavior that would bait the world into war–and that such a war would lead inevitably to a flood of new recruits, offended by the excessive force that the western coalition will no doubt use against them. As the collateral damages pile up, retaliation will be only too easy to justify. Launching airstrikes against ISIS may make us feel like we are assuming control of the situation, but we are merely playing out a role that ISIS has written for us. The harder we strike back, the more justified their original acts of violence will appear.

Those who have joined ISIL should leave the battlefield while they can.

Don’t worry, Obama, they’re already on their way out, ready to scatter to the four corners of the earth so that in the future, there’s no way you’ll be able to bomb them without also bombing yourself.

There can be no reasoning – no negotiation – with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force. 

Funny, based on our response to ISIS, I can imagine them saying exactly the same thing about us, hence the beheading videos. However, rather than attempt to teach them a new language–a language that builds rather than destroys–Obama and co. have merely decided to respond in their native tongue. After all, if both sides can agree on one thing, it’s that killing is a perfectly legitimate means by which to achieve your goals. The only disagreements concern the methods used (beheading is so 12th century), the victims chosen, and the objectives to be obtained. This whiff of moral equivalency brings to mind the words of Miroslav Volf in Exclusion and Embrace:

Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. 

This is exactly what Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama’s comments at the US were designed to do–remove ISIS from the community of humans. It’s easy to behead or bomb someone whom you no longer count among your kind, but it’s much more difficult to bomb or behead the enemy if we assume the posture of “There but for the grace of God go I.” To my way of thinking, this is the only way to counter the language of violence–with the language of love and forgiveness. As Volf concludes,

No one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without overcoming this double exclusion — without transposing the enemy from the sphere of the monstrous… into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness. When one knows [as the cross demonstrates] that the torturer will not eternally triumph over the victim, one is free to rediscover that person’s humanity and imitate God’s love for him. And when one knows [as the cross demonstrates] that God’s love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself in the light of God’s justice and so rediscover one’s own sinfulness.

President Obama is not a stupid man. Neither are the people who serve in his administration. So I can only assume they know the war they have embarked upon is unwinnable. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of history realizes that even if they manage to squelch this particular manifestation of religiously fuelled hatred, another, more powerful version will arise in its place, just as ISIS has replaced Al Qaeda as public enemy number one.

Therefore, the only way I can rationalize their behavior in the face of this obvious trap is to assume a much bigger, more complex game is being played. Perhaps the coalition has no intention of “winning” against ISIS at all. Maybe they’re playing ISIS’s game because they actually do share the same ultimate goal–perpetuating instability in Iraq, Syria and throughout the Middle East, because such instability is a steady cash cow for those who profit from such things.

I hate to adopt such a cynical, conspiratorial approach, but the only other option is to assume that somehow I am able to see something in this conflict that President Obama and his people have missed, and I have a much more difficult time believing that.