Irresponsible Marco Wants to Fight an Entire Religion, Apparently

Marco Rubio makes me sick sometimes. Calling for a war with Islam is one of them:

Marco Rubio appeared on This Week yesterday morning, where he took umbrage at Hillary Clinton’s statement that the United States is “at war with jihadists” but not “at war with Islam.” Rubio declared himself baffled by Clinton’s carefully parsed distinctions. “I don't understand it,” said Rubio. “That would be like saying we weren't at war with the Nazis, because we were afraid to offend some Germans who may have been members of the Nazi Party, but weren't violent themselves.” If we tease out Rubio’s metaphor, the Muslim faith as a whole is equivalent to Nazism, and violent jihadi terrorists are the equivalent of the Nazi leadership. Rubio has a knack for grasping the midpoint of Republican Party doctrine at any given moment, and his comments reflect the party’s renewed conviction that the war against terrorists must be defined in the broadest possible terms.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, believes in defining the conflict in the most narrow terms. There is a very good reason for this. The United States is not actually at war with Islam. Non-extremist Muslims account for the lion's share of the victims of jihadist terror, and are needed as allies in the conflict. Air strikes and counterterrorism may be important tools against ISIS, but in the long run, we need non-radicals to maintain the loyalties of the majority of the Muslim world. If the Muslim world gravitates toward its most extreme elements, the West will find itself in an unwinnable struggle against an enemy that can generate fighters moving invisibly among 1.6 billion people worldwide. The radicals want to persuade the rest of the Muslims that they represent Islam writ large in a clash against Christians and Jews. The West’s strategy is predicated on breaking down this link, making it as hard as possible for them to claim that the West is at war with Islam as a whole.

It actually got worse:

And Rubio has rushed out a new video in which he vaguely demands a “clash of civilizations.” Rubio plays it a bit coy, repeatedly describing the conflict as “them” and “us,” without specifying who is them and who is us. This is a characteristically Rubio-esque evasion that allows the most rabid Islamophobes to read his position as a call for a Crusades-style war between Christianity and Islam, but without tying Rubio explicitly to such a formulation. (He can always insist that he meant “us” to include non-violent Muslims.) The problem, of course, is that the most inflammatory interpretation of Rubio’s words is available not only to Christian culture warriors but also to Islamic culture warriors. Indeed, the entire Republican Party has transformed itself into a propaganda machine working in effect, if not intent, to reinforce ISIS’s message that the Christian and Muslim worlds are locked in violent, unresolvable conflict.

What a great recruiting video for ISIS. No really, if Rubio worked for them, he couldn't have done them a more solid than this. Making this a black-and-white war between religions is perfect for them. ISIS would love a fight where even non-radical Muslims are set against the West. Rubio just did his most solid to make that happen. His inexperience and incapability to do the job of President is on display here.