Only an oaf as clueless as Secretary of State John Kerry would try to find a silver lining in Tuesday’s terrorist attack at Turkey’s Ataturk Airport, which killed at least 41 and wounded 200-plus.
The attack, now widely seen as an ISIS operation, is actually a sign the Islamic State is on the run, Kerry claimed.
After all, he said while speaking at a festival in Aspen, ISIS hasn’t launched a full-scale military offensive in more than a year.
“And if you’re desperate and if you know you are losing,” he added, then you’ll be more open to launching attacks in which “you can do some harm.”
That, as Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Texas) noted, simply “defies reality.” After all, he pointed out, Kerry and President Obama have said ISIS is “on the run for many years, and they’re not — they’re on the rise.”
The group is losing ground in Iraq and Syria, but it now has at least five other major active branches on several continents.
Obama, of course, famously dismissed ISIS as a “JV team” as it began its rapid expansion in Iraq, then later boasted that it had been “contained” just hours before ISIS plotters killed 100 innocents in Paris.
And it continues to inspire deadly lone-wolf attacks like San Bernardino and Orlando, leading to what McCaul calls “an unprecedented pace of terror.”
As it is, the death toll in Istanbul would’ve likely been even higher had an airport security officer not given his life by wrestling one of the three terrorists — who sported AK-47s and explosive vests — to the ground.
Kerry would do well to review what CIA Director John Brennan told Congress this month: US efforts on the battlefield, he said, “have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach.”
In other words, there’s no connection between the battlefield and ISIS’s ability to commit mass murder: “The group’s foreign branches and global networks can help preserve its capacity for terrorism regardless of events in Iraq and Syria,” he testified.
Sounds like the one who’s truly desperate here is John Kerry — desperate to paint a bright picture of policies that aren’t working.