'You Cannot Use Military Force to Wipe Out Terrorism'

• But the problem is, as long as you’re doing the military, the others don’t work. You can’t be bombing people and at the same time think that you’re going to succeed at, quote, “persuading” them, which is one of the great things the Obama administration has talked about wanting to do, persuading them that ISIS is not their friend. Well, it might be easier to persuade them of that if you weren’t killing them. You know, it’s — there’s something illogical there.
• Janine Jackson interviewed Phyllis Bennis about ISIS attacks for the July 8, 2016, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)

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Phyllis Bennis: “You can’t be bombing people and at the same time think that you’re going to succeed at ‘persuading’ them.

July 8, 2016 | Janine Jackson: Early in the morning of Sunday, July 3, a truck bomb exploded in a shopping district in Baghdad. Many of the more than 200 people killed were children shopping for new clothes for Eid Al-Fitr. The group ISIS claimed responsibility.

That was two days after militants claiming fealty to ISIS killed 22 people in Dhaka, Bangladesh, after an 11-hour siege on a cafe. It was five days after at least 42 people were killed in Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport. And it was the day before three separate bomb attacks across Saudi Arabia, including one in the holy city of Medina near a site sacred to Muslims, the mosque where the prophet Mohammed is believed to be buried.

Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. Her most recent book is Understanding ISIS and the New Global War on Terror. Find her article “From Paris to Istanbul: More War on Terror Means More Terrorist Attacks” on Foreign Policy in Focus. 

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