Really?
[Edward] Luce doesn't mince words: "It is hard to overstate the damage the Iraq War did to America's global soft power -- and to the credibility of the West's democratic mission."
And the damage continues: "[I]n the eyes of the Islamists, Trump has simply dropped the pretense. The West was always at war with Islam. Trump has removed the mask. At a moment when ISIS is on the military retreat in Iraq and Syria, Trump has made their drive for fresh recruits much easier."
Democracy, it turns out, is difficult to promote at the end of a gun.
I will remind you that jihadis attacked America on September 11, 2001, a full year and a half before we led the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam and liberate his people. And planning for the al Qaeda terror attack went back well into the Clinton administration.
As for Iraq being an assault on Islam in the eyes of Islamists, what on God's green Earth doesn't set them off?
Also, explain the 2011 Arab Spring's (failed) drive to replace autocracy with democracy rather than hope Islamist rule will solve the Arab world's problems? After 8 years of American presence in Iraq fighting to defend democracy those young people in the Arab world rose up calling for democracy.
Let me note that I am repulsed at how racist it is not to admit that eight years of the soothing balms of hope and change and a perfectly lovely outreach speech to the Islamic world by President Obama didn't restore our soft power wrecked by overthrow of the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein.
Ponder that Islamists simply think Obama was just a better concealed version of Trump in Luce's analysis that condemns America.
So doesn't blaming Trump for inspiring the recruitment of killers of little girls lead to the uncomfortable conclusion that only one portion of the alienated "world" has decided that mass murder of Western children and other civilians is the right response?
You can't get democracy at the end of a gun. But you can sure end or prevent democracy at the end of a gun.
So guns in the hands of good guys are necessary to provide the opportunity to build democracy in the face of bad guys with guns who don't want it. That's what we did and that's what Luce condemns as alienating the world.
That glorious soft power didn't protect us on 9/11 and it won't protect us in the future as long as killers who rejoice at the deaths of little girls are allowed to live.
I guarantee that when we drive those loser killers into the ground and drive their faces into the dirt with defeat and a jihadi body count so bad that they can't spin it into victory, their recruitment will decline.
To Hell with Luce. So I'm not mincing words, you understand.
