No, Rubio, ISIS Attacks Are Not About ‘Hating Freedom’
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., speaks to media outside his office on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, June 22, 2016
By Peter Beinart The Atlantic Read bio
July 1, 2016
If they were, Turkey wouldn’t be a target.
On Wednesday on CNN, Marco Rubio said the Islamic State, which Turkish officials believe carried out this week’s attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport, had two motivations. First, “they ultimately want them to be a part of the caliphate.” Sure, but “ultimately,” ISIS wants every place on earth to be part of its caliphate. That doesn’t explain why the organization struck Turkey now. Rubio’s second explanation was more convincing: “They’re looking to punish Turkey for allowing U.S. airstrikes to be conducted from an airbase within Turkey. … They’ve made that abundantly clear.”
Yes, they have. ISIS may eventually wish to conquer the entire world. But in the here and now, it generally attacks countries that are attacking it. The Georgetown University terrorism expert Daniel Byman has noted that until the U.S. and its allies began bombing the Islamic State in the summer of 2014, the group “focused first and foremost on its immediate theater of operations” in Iraq and Syria. A study by the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment detected only four ISIS-related plots in the West from January 2011 to May 2014. Then, between July 2014 and June 2015, the number spiked to 26.
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