This is stupid stuff, but maybe not as stupid as the stuff the war drum bangers charging toward the gates of hell would have the country do. But we might expect more from leadership than managing to do less stupid stuff that the hopefully-we-get-it-right crowd.
According to most reports, ISIS is widely hated in the Arab world. Assuming that's true, the smart thing would be to offer to help them if they ever get around to wanting to fight ISIS rather than playing ISIS off against other enemies. We could wait a long time for that. And that's a good thing.
The president's plan to fight ISIS is stupid stuff in another way: it's hardly adequate to the over-stated task. But that's a smart thing about the stupid stuff. The hyper-rhetoric revives what's left of patriotic flag-rallying around a White House whose party faces an election potentially more devastating than any proposed attack on ISIS. So the ISIS-fever, to the extent the president and his surrogates can generate it, seems likely to help Democratic candidates, at least to the extent that "fighting terror" drives other issues out of the news. Since those Muslims are going to be killing each other anyway, why shouldn't they die to preserve a Democratic majority in the Senate?
And there's another possibly smart move inherent in this stupid stuff over ISIS. The bloody bone of bombing and expanded killing in Iraq distracts the warrior class from its frothing over Ukraine, where they've been pushing for doing stuff that risks being existentially stupid.
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