The Liberal View of ISIS -- Just a Misunderstanding

J.M. Berger of the Brookings Institution is the author of a book about ISIS.  He is supposedly an "expert" on the terror group.  Nevertheless, even in that supposed role, he still hews to the liberal talking points about the terror group.  Berger is, indeed, a good example of the sort of delusional thinking that permeates the leftwing bubble that includes most of liberal Washington, the liberal media and the liberal institutions like Brookings.  To these people, the Paris attacks were not only spectacular large scale successes by ISIS, but they came as a complete surprise.  Berger is out today with a lengthy article in another leftist source, Politico, called "How We Underestimated ISIL".  Here's a small bit of what Berger says about the world's view of ISIS:


"Several phases of denial have played out. Initially, some experts speculated that ISIL had no particular aspirations to execute spectacular attacks outside its borders. Then, some argued that Al Qaeda was more sophisticated than ISIL, and therefore posed the greater threat. Finally, the focus shifted to so-called lone wolf attacks, an area in which everyone eventually could agree ISIL excels.
All of these hedged assertions looked reasonable when compared with vague and irresponsible alarms from some quarters about the existential threat ISIL allegedly posed to the American homeland and the West in general.
...
But the most important lesson may be how fundamentally misunderstood ISIL’s capabilities, behaviors and intentions have been."


Think about what Berger says and how it illustrates the thinking of the liberal groupthink that controls in Washington and the media.  He tells us that the thinking of the "experts" was actually a manifestation of denial.  In other words, the experts were not only wrong, they were refusing to see the actual reality.  But even after pointing to denial by the so called experts, Berger still talks of the "vague and irresponsible alarms from some quarters about the existential threat" from ISIL to America and the West.  In other words, the people who did not engage in denial and who saw the threat from ISIS for what it actually is, namely, an existential threat to America and the West, were issuing "vague and irresponsible alarms".  It's amazing.  The people Berger calls "irresponsible" are the ones who got it right, while the experts to whom Berger gives credit were in denial about reality.  When Berger sums up the most important lesson of Paris, it is how the capabilities, behavior and intent of ISIS were "fundamentally misunderstood."  Again, the people who did not misunderstand were the ones issuing "vague and irresponsible alarms" while the delusional people who refused to see the actual intentional and capabilities of ISIS just "misunderstood" the situation.

Do we ever get to the point where the liberals can accept that they were wrong and others were right?  It certainly does not seem so.

And after all this recognition of the denial by the experts, what is Berger's idea of the proper goal now?  It's not destruction of ISIS.  No, Berger talks instead about trying "to measure the proportionality of our response to an attack".  In his world, the response to ISIS for the slaughter of all these innocents is not the destruction of ISIS, but rather a "proportionate" response which is just strong enough to show our displeasure.  Even now, Berger and his ilk cannot accept the truth that ISIS is a manifestation of evil in our world and ISIS and its supporters need to be eradicated.  This truly is a war.  We will either win or lose.  The issue of proportionate response is total nonsense.