So, contrary to djf in the thread, my support for the president’s effort to destroy the Islamic State has nothing to do with whether the guy Obama is worthy of support, based on his record. His record ain’t so good. But he has articulated the proper end, and now harsh experience will, we can hope, get him to work on the means. He is worthy of support because he is president, has a fixed term, is (not Congress or even Rand Paul or Ted Cruz) commander-in-chief, and will not be impeached. His most realistic critics, such as Walter Russell Mead and Angelo Codevilla, are actually offering him criticism he can use. Experience suggests he just can’t learn? Well, we’re in a rather unprecedented situation.
Part of that unprecedented situation, truth to tell, is the prospect of the extinction of Christians and Christianity in Iraq. Well, not only Iraq, of course. And not only Iraq and Syria . . . It’s easy to agree that the destruction of Christianity and Judaism hasn’t always been and is not necessarily the mission of Islam. But we’re stuck with confronting where the action is now.
Our Jim Ceaser in his signature work on American exceptionalism puts forward the proposition that a large part of the singular mission of our country these days is to protect the practice of Biblical religion — which, in this case, means Christianity and Judaism — in the world. That means protecting the truth found in the Bible about the personal Creator and human persons being essentially “transpolitical.” True religion is not essentially civil theology, and religious truth isn’t essentially a matter of law. Human freedom, if you think about it, can’t just be the freedom of autonomous individuals. Just as it can’t just be some abstract “intellectual” or philosophic freedom. It has be a moral, relational, and intellectual freedom characteristic of each and every whole person, a freedom for religious communities as organized bodies of thought and action not subservient to the state.
The recognition of that freedom might be the main difference between our Constitution and the constitutions that flow from the French Revolution. And it was the main thing that connected our country in the war against Communism with our European allies that had, to some large extent or another, abandoned and stood against the French revolutionary idea of an omnicompetent state that depends on something like Rousseau’s civil religion.
President Obama, you say, has pushed understandings of our Constitution foreign to the true spirit of the Free Exercise Clause and so opposed to the freedom of the church (and synagogue). Sure, but his threat can be exaggerated, and maybe he can be chastened on more than one front.
There’s also a connection between the president’s inability to really “get” the “existential threat” faced by Israel and his inability to get the one faced by Christians throughout the Islamic world (well, not only the Islamic world) now. Still, we can’t forget that he’s far from completely pulled the plug on Israel. And his defense of civilization against barbarism that’s at the foundation of our resolve to destroy the Islamic State can’t help but have something to do, even in his own mind, with wanting to stop the indiscriminate slaughter of Christians.
Our defense of Israel may or may not be in our national interest, understood through the lens of ”realist theory.” The same with our war against the Islamic State. There are other terrorist groups that may well be more of a threat to us, and we’re not mobilizing our power and, we hope, a coalition to destroy them. Those causes are in our national interest only if we, as a nation, stand for more than our comfort and security.
Peggy Noonan has made some very astute observations about the return of most of the American people to an interventionist mode. They had, after all, pretty much concluded that we had failed in our efforts at “nation building” in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than that, she reminds us, calls flooded the offices of Republicans in Congress opposing the president’s plan to drop bombs in Syria to help the insurgents. They didn’t think Obama knew what he was doing, and the intervention wasn’t about a vital interest to our country.
Most revealing of all, in her opinion, was the lack of support from conservative Christian groups in America for the bombing foray. One reason is that they understood why Christians in Syria might fear a future worse than Assad, just as Christians in Iraq have experienced terror much worse than Saddam Hussein’s.
But now, the same groups are the most fervent interventionists, because there’s no doubt that the Islamic State is out to kill all of their fellow believers. And there’s only one way that the ”genocidal” (to use the term loosely) project can be stopped.
It’s also true, for now, that this appetite for intervention is limited. The goal, as Noonan says, is to take out the evildoers now, quickly, yesterday.
That American Christians might be more concerned now about the Islamic State than about the threats to Israel is understandable on many levels. Sure, the Christians in Israel are free to worship in peace, but the other Christians in the region don’t have the option of moving there. And no other government (except the de facto government of Kurdistan and arguably Egypt for the moment) in the region is anything but hostile toward them. Israel, quite understandably, isn’t going into battle on their behalf. America can, though, at least when extinction is the issue.
It is also true that all Christians and all Jews everywhere should be clear that the same people (and I don’t mean Islamic people as such, of course) who want to get rid of all of the Christians also want to get rid of all of the Jews. All past animosities should fade before that fact, a fact that should guide American policy. Given their difficult and highly vulnerable predicaments and historical experience, it just might be a bit much to lecture Arab Christians too self-righteously about that fact. And of course we can trust that President Obama won’t make the mistake of using support for Israel as some kind of litmus test for support for Christians in the Middle East. (There’s a little or more irony in that last sentence.)
What do I think about Cruz’s speech? I’m already past it. Too much Republican deliberation, in my opinion, has been all about Cruz. And the commentary in the speech’s wake isn’t doing anyone much good.