Islamic State attacks on religious minorities ‘genocide,’ Canadian ambassador says | Toronto Star

Trying to straddle the fine line between strong condemnation of ISIS and not leading to further mission creep and a seeming endorsement of R2P (Responsibility to Protect):

And, he says, it’s time that Canadians, who live in a secular society, brought religion into public debate — something many Western governments have shied away from.

“We can’t be afraid of religion in public discourse and how we advance foreign policy goals. We cannot say that religion is just bad, because it isn’t. It motivates people to great good and justice. But when we talk about the advancement of religious freedom we don’t mean theological disputes. We’re looking at the inherent dignity of every human being.”

Canada is well placed to set an example of tolerance, he said. But it is also correct to take military and humanitarian action on “religiously based persecutions,” that amount to “genocides in the case of the Yazidis and Christians.” The Islamic State has threatened both groups with conversion to their brand of radical Islam or death, and has massacred hundreds of men, women and children.

“The worst thing we can do is to throw up our hands and say it’s too complicated and we need to back away,” Bennett said. “It depends on countries of goodwill like Canada and its allies — that believe in democracy, freedom, rule of law and human rights — to take a stand.”

Islamic State attacks on religious minorities ‘genocide,’ Canadian ambassador says | Toronto Star.

And an interesting take on ISIS, and valid caution regarding further intervention beyond air strikes and the related current approach.

But the political pressures to do more, not least for the “brilliant” minds cheerleading the 2003 Iraq war, are hard to resist:

Unless politicians in the United States and allies in the West fall back on their traditional “Fire first, think later” approach to military planning. Consider for a moment: ISIS has suddenly begun decapitating Western journalists and placing the videos online for everyone to see. The target audience, of course, is the United States. ISIS says it is engaging in this barbarism to warn the Americans away, but even they aren’t that stupid. The 9/11 attacks, as every terrorist knows, were intended to and succeeded in luring us into war—just as bin Laden hoped it would. He believed his Al-Qaeda fighters would defeat the American military and drive it from Saudi Arabia. Why would ISIS think that killing a few journalists would cause the United States to cower when slaughtering thousands did not?

Simple: They don’t. As one terrorism expert told me, ISIS is hoping America will go too far in response, launch attacks that kill lots of innocent Muslims in an attempt to wipe out the jihadists. That would not destroy ISIS, but would derail the Islamic threat to the group. For no matter how hated ISIS is among the other jihadists and Middle Eastern Muslims, the United States is despised more. A new American strategic blunder on par with the Iraq War would distract ISIS’s Islamic enemies and turn the battle, once again, toward the U.S. If ISIS is to survive, it needs America to strike out rashly and harshly against it.

All this sounds like three-dimensional chess and it is. Unfortunately, in a world of Twitter foreign policy analysis and cable news blathering, America is rarely able to handle more than checkers when trying to address global threats. Yes, ISIS is hoping to strike us with something, anything, and it has enough supporters in the United States that it may succeed in executing an attack on a soft target. But the purpose of such an assault will be to provoke a response, one that will, inadvertently, save ISIS from the threat of the billions of other Muslims who want nothing to do with the group.

So, remember this: Every time you hear some commentator say America should “do something,” they are reading from the ISIS script. The U.S. can soften up ISIS with strategic bombing to aid the Islamic fighters taking them on. But it cannot beat them by rolling the Humvees back into Iraq or Syria. ISIS will be defeated by its own brutality against the people who might otherwise be their allies. In this case, the enemies of our enemies are truly our friends, at least for now.

ISIS will fall. It is inevitable. That is, unless the United States becomes the stupid one and gives them what they want.

ISISs Enemy List: 10 Reasons the Islamic State Is Doomed.