Only if we keep electing Democrats.
Making a State by Iron and Blood – Foreign Policy, Rosa Brooks
Britain built an empire on the slave trade. Germany perpetrated the greatest genocide in human history. Who says the Islamic State won’t be a U.S. ally someday?
The self-styled Islamic State has killed thousands in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere, and states and media outlets around the world continue to decry its brutal tactics, which include a penchant for public decapitations, the mass slaughter of unarmed prisoners, and the sexual enslavement of women and girls
Still, if Western history is any guide, the Islamic State could well be on its way to global legitimacy.
History assures us that the commission of mass atrocities is no bar to future success. During the “reign of terror” that followed the French Revolution, France’s revolutionary government publicly beheaded an estimated 30,000-40,000 people — all in the name of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. In the early 1790s, at least 150,000 other unfortunate French citoyens were shot, burned to death, hacked to pieces, or deliberately drowned in France’s Vendée region. “I crushed the children under the feet of the horses,” French Gen. François Joseph Westermann is said to have written after one particularly brutal campaign. “[I] massacred the women who, at least for these, will not give birth to any more brigands…. I have exterminated all. The roads are sown with corpses.” Well, tant pis! “Mercy,” Westermann concluded, “is not a revolutionary sentiment.”
It doesn’t make for pleasant reading, but it was all so long ago. Today, France is a significant European power and major U.S. ally.
Too many years ago to count? Alright, consider Turkey. Between 1915 and 1918, Ottoman authorities killed more than a million Armenians in what pretty much everyone except the Turkish state now calls a genocide. But a hundred years have gone by, and today, Turkey’s a vital NATO ally.
Ancient history? Fast forward to the 1940s. The death toll from the Holocaust was some 11 million civilians, most of them Jews. But today, Germany is our bester Freund in the European Union. No worries, Angela Merkel, all is forgiven!