Marie Harf: Americans Are Too Dumb to Understand We Can’t Kill Every Terrorist, and Shouldn’t Try
Here’s how you endear yourself with the American public – tell them they’re just too stupid to understand your subtle foreign policy of letting terrorists take over the world!
Watch below:
Here’s a transcript of the comments before she insulted everyone:
WB: You said that the U.S. cannot kill our way out of this war, that the U.S. needs to go after the root causes that lead these young men, mostly men, some women, to go and join ISIS or Al Qaeda or Al Shabaab or these terrorist groups.
MH: I’m not the first person to say something like this. Military commanders that we’ve had throughout many years here fighting this war on terrorism have said the exact same thing, that in the short term when there’s a threat like ISIL, we’ll take direct military action against these terrorists. We have done that. We are doing that in Iraq and Syria. But longer term, we have to look at how we combat the conditions that can lead people to turn to extremism. If you think about, you know, if there’s a radical jihadi on the internet who is putting out hateful videos, that’s powerful and dangerous, right? But if there are 10,000 men in a country willing to blow themselves up because of what it says on the internet, that’s much more dangerous. So how do you get these 10,000 it people not to pick up the ak-47 and do something positive in their life? Looking at the long-term problem, not just the short-term one.
WB: So you suggest that maybe if you find these young men jobs, they might not become terrorists?
MH: I think that’s a gross oversimplification. There’s things like good governance and if there is not good governance, it creates a space for people to get to the root of their cause. We’ve seen that in Libya. Where there’s a lack of governance, you’ve see young men attracted to this cause. We’ve seen this around the Middle East and around the world. How do you get at that root cause? That’s really the bigger point.
WB: But you know, of course, some of the best-known terrorists out there came from wealth and privileged, higher education, degrees, Bin Laden himself.
MH: Asolutely. It takes on a variety of different ways that you can do that here. Part of it is military. Absolutely. We’re taking direct action against ISIL in Iraq. But look, if we look around the world and say longer term we cannot kill every terrorist around the world nor should we try, how do you get at the root causes of this? It might be too nuanced of an argument for some like I’ve seen some of the commentary out there in the last 24 hours but it’s the smart way that the Republicans, Democrats, our partners in the Arab world think we need to combat it.
This is just stupid thinking. We can’t catch every murderer – should we just stop trying? We can’t catch every rapist, should we just stop trying? This is typical of the Obama kind of debate – you don’t engage with what people say, but with strawmen representations that will make you sound smart. In this case, it failed on both accounts.
The entire video is available at the Right Scoop!