Friday, September 26, 2014

Threat Level: Bogus?

Foreign Policy's Rosa Brooks gleefully mocked Obama's U.N. address this week:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: My fellow Americans, the Middle East today is frighteningly full of threatiness.

What, you ask, is threatiness? As my good friend Mr. Stephen Colbert will surely understand, threatiness is to threat as truthiness is to truth. By this, I mean that sometimes we cannot articulate why something is a threat, or offer evidence, but we still think it just feels, you know, threaty. We know it in our gut. And let me be clear: when there is enough threatiness floating around, America must take action.

So when exactly is somebody going to make a halfway-decent case for why anything in Syria or Iraq is enough of a threat to justify going back to war?  I'm not sure there is a case to be made.

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