Deliver us from moral hazards

Where would we be without the clear thinking that the NYT's editorial page brings to public discourse? In what maybe the foremost example of hard headed, deductive, editorial, reasoning since "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus", Michael Boyle warns that moralistic language used by Obama and Kerry creates a moral hazard and blurs reality.

In an eerie echo of President George W. Bush’s description of the global war on terrorism as a campaign against “evildoers,” President Obama described ISIS as a “cancer” spreading across the Middle East that had “no place in the 21st century.” Secretary of State John Kerry condemned ISIS as the face of a “savage” and “valueless evil,” while Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, called the group “barbaric.”

Where was Mr. Boyle when Vice President Biden called the Tea Party terrorists?

There is no question that ISIS has committed thousands of grave human rights violations against civilians in Iraq and Syria, and that many of its most gruesome acts, like the execution of Mr. Foley, constitute war crimes. Anyone with a conscience is disgusted by their brutality toward not just Mr. Foley but the thousands of Iraqi and Syrian civilians whom they have killed, raped and even buried alive.

Of course, as Mr. Boyle points out, that doesn't make them bad people. According to him normative labels only confuse the issue. He probably wet all over himself when President Ronald Reagan called the old Soviet Union an evil empire yet it was Reagan's perception of evil and the courage to call evil by its proper name that gave him the moral resolve to win the cold war. Readers should not be surprised to learn that "see no evil Boyle" was a counter terrorism advisor to the first Obama presidential campaign.

Unlike Al Qaeda, whose dreams of forming a caliphate were little more than mysticism and hyperbole, ISIS now occupies large swaths of Syria and Iraq, administering social services and running rudimentary Shariah courts in its claimed Islamic State. In other words, it operates less like a revolutionary terrorist movement that wants to overturn the entire political order in the Middle East than a successful insurgent group that wants a seat at that table.

In addition to wondering what sort of social services other than ethnic cleansing ISIS brings to the party one wonders if ruthless efficiency begets moral legitimacy. If a group can capture a territory quickly enough it becomes a state deserving a seat at the table? It's as if a horse thief can steal horses quickly enough he be comes a respected rancher and begin lynching horse thieves.
When murder is no longer sin nor crime but merely a human rights abuse equivalent to keeping a felon in a dirty cell Boyle and ISIS will have defeated morality and not for the first time. Up until the very day the Muslim Brotherhood was removed from power and jailed in Egypt the New York Times, the State Department, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama portrayed the Brotherhood as merely an especially exuberant fraternal organization not much different than the Shiners or Knights of Columbus. Without moral labels there is little morality. This editorial is a reminder to Obama to turn off the heat lest the public realize he is not doing anything.