The President's approach to ISIS is a symptom of national failure, intellectual, institutional and leadership fatigue engulfing the US. The idea that we can do something, anything, about ISIS is an illusion.
Johan Galtung:
There are other factors, but the common denominator is us, US.
Change that policy and the world would be easier to cope with.
But, the problem is whether Washington is too autistic to think thoughts beyond its bombing-droning-sniping obsession.
The Guardian, 9 July 2014: “Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown. Social science is being militarized to develop social tools to target peaceful activists and protest movements.” The US military is turning inward, obviously to protect the white 1% who feeds them.
Galtung sees the phenomenon of mass shootings in the US as a symptom of our political problems:
Moreover, it comes on top of another sad phenomenon in the USA: the increasing collective shootings all over the country, geographically and socially, in addition to the usual homicides and suicides, bad enough. The standard analysis is to psychiatrize the murderer, searching for a profile and its likes in society to prevent more shootings.
Another approach would focus on the shootings as a collective, slow suicide of a US incapable of solving its countless problems, even addressing them, to the point that people simply give a damn, kill what they see as the problem including, often, themselves. General demoralization has such consequences, like the suicide epidemic at the end of the Austrian-Hungarian empire and beyond, lasting to our days.
The US can solve the problems facing us. We have to admit that the problems exist before we can solve them. The end of empire is a delicate time. We have the wit, the innovation, the intellect to navigate successfully. Do we have the will?