Approval numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, it’s interesting to see how public opinion has begun to shift on the Islamic State. According to a new poll by CNN, a full 57 percent of Americans say they disapprove of the way President Obama is handling ISIS. Only 40 percent approve. While those numbers aren’t far off from where they were in September, another question demonstrates how things have changed.
When asked about putting American ground troops in Iraq, 47 percent of respondents said they supported such a measure. That’s a shift from September, when 60 percent said they opposed the use of ground forces. In the meantime, reports about the ineffectiveness of the U.S. airstrike campaign, disturbing ISIS videos, and high-profile terror attacks in Paris and Denmark have clearly made an impact on the American psyche.
No, They Just Need Jobs
While half the country supports killing these radicals using any means necessary, the administration is determined to offer comedic solutions to the problem. According to Marie Harf of the State Department, we don’t need to kill the terrorists; instead, we need to find them some good old fashioned…employment.
“We cannot win this war by killing them,” she told Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball Monday. “We need to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs, whether–”
When interrupted by Matthews, who argued that “there’s always going to be poor people,” Harf insisted that helping Middle Eastern countries improve their economies was the only way to win the fight against ISIS.
There’s nothing wrong with looking at the root causes for this kind of rampant evil, but economy-building should not be our focus. As Matthews said, there will always be poor people. There will always be excuses. But there are millions of poor people who do not turn to Islamic terror. They do not begin beheading Christians.
The root cause of this terrorism is not poverty. It is an evil, twisted ideology, and that’s what our current leaders don’t want to admit. They don’t want to believe that Islam – in whatever form ISIS takes it – is behind these brutal slayings. It has to be something deeper. It has to have its roots in American oppression somehow. There has to be a way to blame it on climate change, the West’s rampant greed, Republicans, white people…something. It can’t be the religion of peace. It can’t be the fault of those poor, poor Arabs.
If the CNN poll is anything to go by, Americans are fed up with this president’s disconnect. They are sick of the excuses. They want to know why their country is sitting idly by while people are murdered in the most horrific ways imaginable. No one wants war. But this is a war that has come to us. The time has come to fight it.
