43 " You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'
44 "But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
This is the only practical, realistic method, for winning the hearts and minds campaign in Muslim nations, for decreasing support for the Jihadists, and for our own security.
I don't want to sound too critical, but your suggestions have no practical use. Even if we take JK's position that all this is just a crime prevention issue, a factual study of crime in NYC alone for decades shows that the grouphug approach doesn't work even in reducing crime.
Crime in NYC decreased as Giuliani hired a lot of policemen, and stiffened the criminal system, and he did good PR.
If we move from the criminal justice system to the Foreign Policy arena, where motives are much more complex. The fact of the matter is, from Chamberlain's acquisence to Hitler on Czechoslovakia to Carter's appeasement to Khomeni to Kerry's signed deal with Ortega to Clinton's nuclear deal with North Korea, I have yet to see a single instance of grouphug touchy feely strategies bring lasting peace in foreign policy.
In fact, when we examine the various periods of peace in recent times, they all occured only when men reviled as War Hawks took unpopular stands and pushed uncomfortable policies.
UK hated Churchill in the pre war days, and turfed him out when he continued to signal the warnings about Stalin after the british got tired of war and would do anything for peace. Churchill didn't believe in the touchy feely stuff but Chamberlain did.
Jimmy Carter was a deeply religious man with deep conscience and he does believe in the grouphug mentality you are teaching us. Yet, this compassionate liberalism brought stagflation, high unemployment, double digit inflation (13.5% in 1980), on the domestic front, and gave us the rise of Iran : the hostage crisis and rise of the first modern Islamic Theocracy --- a major milestone in the growth of islamic extemism the full extent of which are being understood only today.
Ronald Reagan was reviled in the streets of Europe, hardly a week passes when you don't see an uncle sam or reagan effigy burning somewhere on some street in some city of europe. He was not only a war hawk, he was a simpleton, idiotic, naive to pick just a few less colorful accolades that his critics gave him.
Yet, while Jimmy Carter grouphug strategy brought ruin and stagnation, it was Ronald Reagan's warhawk strategy gave the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Grouphugs just don't work.
9/11 alone if answered with the same grouphug ideas will not work simply because there is no historical precedence on the earthly plane for such ideas to work. |
