Steve Hayes makes the key points in his criticism of the speech — the president rejected American exceptionalism, diminished the achievement of U.S. arms in Iraq, and invoked numerous strawmen — all of which seemed an attempt to reframe the course of history and the current friction between Islam and the West . The president seems to genuinely believe that dialogue,
and not threats, coercion, and violence, are the best
It was violence and 600,000 Americans killed in bloody combat that excised the lash from American life, not peaceful and determined resistance. If only the same story could be found in South Africa then apartheid might not have survived well into the 1980s. Violence is not a dead end, and though terrorism may be, it’s troubling that Obama would conflate the two.The violence of Allied arms ended the Holocaust that Obama touched on rather eloquently today. It was the violence of American arms that routed al Qaeda from Afghanistan and the relative safety provided by the group’s Pakistani sanctuary that has allowed al Qaeda to reorganize. There is no doubt that American democracy allows for progress to be obtained through peaceful and determined insistence, but the world is not like America. If Obama believes in human rights and progress and democracy, he should be working to remake the world in America’s image. Sometimes that will take more than just talk. Also see Ira Stoll on this at Contentions. * This was very poorly phrased and not what I intended to say. Of course dialogue is wonderful and indeed preferable to the use of coercion or force. It is Obama’s certainty that “violence is a dead end” that I object to. My apologies to anyone who quite reasonably assumed otherwise.
