Fox News deity Bill O’Reilly is “tired of the phony rhetoric surrounding the ISIS terror threat” and doesn’t trust that Syrians can handle the job, U.S. training or not, he said on the Factor last night. At the same time, he knows advocating for American troops to take up the fight themselves is extremely unpopular. But O’Reilly, problem solver that he is, has a solution: “elite fighters who would be well paid, well trained to defeat terrorists all over the world.” Since that worked so well in Iraq last time around. What we need is more Blackwater.
In the O’Reilly fantasy, the 25,000-person force would be English-speaking, “recruited by the USA and trained in America by our special operations troops,” and dubbed “the Anti-Terror Army,” because the Avengers is already taken.
To his credit, O’Reilly hosted an actual military expert to assess his blueprint for keeping the American people safe. “This is a terrible idea. It’s a terrible idea not just as a practical matter but as a moral matter,” said Dr. Tom Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. “It’s a morally corrosive idea to try to outsource our national security.”
“We’re not talking about Expendables 8 here,” O’Reilly insisted, “we’re talking about a highly trained, disciplined force.” Way too many summer movies for Papa Bear — all that onscreen violence is corrupting America’s brightest minds.
