By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, August 22, 2014
Does the president think the world is a TV show?
One of the things you learn watching television as a kid
is that the hero wins. No matter how dire things look, the star is going to be
okay. MacGyver always defuses the bomb with some saltwater taffy before the timer
reaches zero. There was no way Fonzie was going to mess up his water-ski jump
and get devoured by sharks.
Life doesn’t actually work like that. That’s one reason
HBO’s Game of Thrones is so compelling. Despite being set in an absurd fantasy
world of giants, dragons, and ice zombies, it’s more realistic than a lot of
dramas set in a more plausible universe in at least one regard. Heroes die. The
good guys get beaten by more committed and ruthless bad guys. No one is safe,
nothing is guaranteed. There is no iron law of the universe that says good will
ultimately triumph.
President Obama often says otherwise.
In his mostly admirable remarks about the beheading of
American journalist James Foley by the jihadists of the so-called “Islamic
State,” Obama returned to two of his favorite rhetorical themes: 1) the idea
that in the end the good guys win simply because they are good, and 2) that
world opinion is a wellspring of great moral authority.
Obama invokes the “right side of history” constantly, not
only that such a thing exists but that he knows what it is and actually speaks
for it as well. Perhaps his favorite quote comes from Martin Luther King Jr.:
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
As for world opinion, particularly in the form of that
global shmoo the “international community,” there’s apparently nothing it can’t
do. It is the secret to “leading from behind.” Behind what, you ask? The
international community. What is the international community? The thing we’re
leading from behind. From Russia to Syria, Iran to North Korea, the president
is constantly calling on the international community to do something he is
unwilling to do. When Russia was carving Crimea away from Ukraine, Obama vowed
that “the United States will stand with the international community in
affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine.”
After pro-Russian forces shot down a civilian plane over Ukraine, and as Russia
lined up troops for a possible invasion, Obama sternly warned that Russia “will
only further isolate itself from the international community.”
Taken together, these two ideas — that everything will
work out in the long run, and that there’s some entity other than the U.S. that
will take care of things — provide a license to do, well, if not nothing, then
certainly nothing that might detract from your golf game.
“One thing we can all agree on,” the president said in
his statement Wednesday, “is that a group like ISIL has no place in the 21st
century.” The jihadists will “ultimately fail . . . because the future is won
by those who build and not destroy. The world is shaped by people like Jim
Foley and the overwhelming majority of humanity who are appalled by those who
killed him.”
It’s a very nice thought. But is it actually true? The
jihadists are building something. They call it the Caliphate, and in a
remarkably short amount of time they’ve made enormous progress. If I had to
bet, I’d guess that they will ultimately fail, but it will be because someone
actually takes the initiative and destroys — as in kills — those trying to
build it. Until that happens, there will be more beheadings, more enslaved
girls, more mass graves. Obama has been very slow to learn this lesson.
Perhaps this is because there’s a deep-seated faith
within progressivism that holds that the mere passage of time drives moral
evolution. As if simply tearing pages from your calendar improves the world. It
is as faith-based as saying evil will not stand because God will not let it,
and far, far less effective at rallying men of goodwill to fight. No doubt some
people will face death to defend an arbitrary date, but not many.
Sometimes lazy TV writers will resort to what is called a
deus ex machina, a godlike intervention or stroke of luck that saves the day
and ensures a happy ending. But in real life, as in Game of Thrones, that
doesn’t happen. The good guys get beheaded while scanning the horizon for a
savior more concrete than world opinion and more powerful than a date on the
calendar.
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