Recent ISIS terror attacks on Paris, Beirut, and a Russian airliner have demonstrated the need for a coordinated global response against the jihadist extremists rather then an American-led combat escalation, said Karen Greenberg, Director of Fordham Law School’s Center on National Security.
ISIS’s continued “brutal and barbaric” acts against various societies and faiths, including other Muslim sects included, have exposed the Islamic State’s goals as not merely anti-West or anti-democracy, thus underscoring the need for a global coalition to confront it, Greenberg explained.
“It’s ISIS against the world and that includes Europe, the United States, Russia, Shia Muslims, the Kurds, and others who oppose the ideology, the barbarism, and the existence and expansion of the Islamic State,” Greenberg said during a phone interview this week. “To say it’s a clash of civilizations is a misnomer. It’s not clash of civilizations. It’s a clash of Isis against all these other forces.”
President Barack Obama vowed this week at the G20 Summit in Turkey not to put troops on the ground in Syria, in the wake of the Paris attacks that left at least 129 dead and the Beirut attacks that killed at least 43. GOP presidential candidates, such as Jeb Bush, have called for Obama to declare war on ISIS, otherwise known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
A wide scale invasion in Syria, Obama said, would risk repeating the same mistakes incurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars that despite high costs in American dollars and troop casualties failed to establish working governments or eliminate Islamic extremism. Obama’s view is a widely held one among Washington intelligence and law-enforcement experts, Greenberg noted.
“If you escalate this war without a heavy reliance on local forces, then it runs the risk over time of a return to the circumstances that existed prior to U.S. intervention,” Greenberg said.
Instead, the U.S., France, and Russia stepped up air strikes this week on strategic ISIS locations in Syria. Russia’s escalated involvement came after President Vladimir Putin accused ISIS of bombing a Russian airliner over Egypt two weeks ago, leading to the deaths of all 224 aboard.
ISIS, whose leadership is mostly Sunni Muslims, views both Shiites and Kurds as progressive opponents to its interpretation of the Koran and its role as harbingers of the apocalypse, according to Graeme Wood’s Atlantic Monthly story titled “What ISIS Really Wants.” ISIS believes the prophesied end times will commence following a military victory in Dabiq, Syria, a symbolic city for the group.
In the wake of the Paris attacks, an online video attributed to ISIS vowed to attack Washington, D.C., in retaliation for U.S. bombing raids in Syria. The terrorist group extended the threat to any other countries that bombed Syria.
NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton raised the specter of an attack on New York City in televised interviews earlier this week, while stating encryption and apps used by terrorists are making it harder to guard against the attacks.
Greenberg praised the work the intelligence community does in recognizing and understanding threats but cautioned against a rush to trade domestic freedoms for surveillance in hopes of preventing an attack.
“Civil liberties are just as important as they have always been whether after 9/11 or the Paris or Beirut attacks,” she said.
Likewise, fear should not dictate U.S. policy on accepting Syrian refugees, she added.
As of Wednesday, 26 U.S. governors had written letters stating they would not accept Syrian refugees in the wake of the Paris and Beirut attacks. The Refugee Act of 1980 provides the president—not governors—final authority on acceptance of refugees. This law could change in time but not to take these refugees would be a mistake, Greenberg said.
“As students of terrorism understand, homeless, stateless individuals who don’t belong to any place and don’t belong to any society, are vulnerable to being recruited by terrorists,” she explained. “Not to mention that taking in these refugees would refute ISIS’s claims that America is the enemy of Muslims and the Middle East.”
–Ray Legendre
