The New Yorker’s George Packer is a decent writer and occasionally insightful analyst, but he gets things spectacularly wrong sometimes. He was one of the so-called “national security liberals” who reluctantly supported the Iraq War. (To his credit, he later recanted.)
Packer has written a piece on ISIS and why they murdered Japanese journalist Kenji Goto. It’s a timely question, given the breaking news that ISIS released yet another sick snuff film today, this time depicting ISIS fighters burning a caged Jordanian pilot alive.