It’s Not Easy Being This Wrong

This morning’s Wall Street Journal editorial stuck in my craw right from the subheading: “The Paris attacks signal a new Islamist terror strategy.” There’s nothing new about it. In a position of strength the radical Islamists fight wars in conventional ways. In a position of weakness they disappear into the cities and fight terror wars with suicide bombers, roadside bombs, and so on. It’s so typical it’s been called “the Arab way of war”. The only thing that’s new is Angela Merkel’s “come one, come all” invitation which, along with the Schengen accords, has allowed the cities the terrorists disappear into to be Brussels, Paris, and Berlin.

The Paris massacre should mark the end of that self-deception. Jimmy Carter shed his illusions about the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and Mr. Obama needs a comparable rendezvous with reality. This will be harder for Mr. Obama, a man of great ideological vanity, but perhaps the prospect of defeat for his party in 2016 will force him to see the world more clearly.

There are no signs of this. The inability of the three Democratic candidates for the presidency to say that our enemies are radical Islamists suggests to me that they value what passes to inclusiveness today beyond all else.

Mr. Obama also deposed Moammar Gadhafi in Libya but then did almost nothing to help Libyans restore order. Americans saw a glimpse of the gathering storm in the terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, but the White House blamed it on an obscure video.

The Qaddafi regime was synonymous with the state in Libya. Once it had been deposed there was no state to maintain. See above.

Now Americans can see clearly the spreading infection from Islamic State and a resurgent al Qaeda. It isn’t merely a regional threat, as Mr. Obama once claimed. Its offshoots have spread into North Africa across the Middle East to Afghanistan. The civil war in Syria has spawned a refugee crisis that has descended on Europe and may have provided cover for at least one of the Paris jihadists.

That is the region. The Middle East and North Africa. The refugee crisis began with Iraqis fleeing into Syria and Jordan. DAESH is a direct outcome of our invasion of Iraq. I continue to believe it was an unintended outcome (although there are some Internet crackpots who claim that DAESH is a CIA construct).

The Paris attack is in some ways even more alarming than 9/11. Airplane hijackings have largely been stopped through enhanced security. Paris suggests that Islamic State has embarked on a strategy of urban unconventional warfare wherever it is able across the West. And it is far harder to track and prevent suicidal jihadists with assault rifles and grenades who want to blow up a restaurant district or concert hall.

I think this is nonsense. 9/11 resulted directly in thousands of deaths (indirectly in hundred of thousands) and trillions of dollars in losses. The only sense in which the Paris attacks, first in January and now in November, are more alarming is that they call into question France’s official policy of one, secular France. There are some French people who simply won’t be included, won’t go along with the plan, won’t be French. I think that will be France’s greatest challenge going forward.

The question now is what America’s President is going to do to prevent more Paris-like carnage, including attacks on U.S. soil. He can start by taking the political restraints off the U.S. military’s campaign against Islamic State.

To what end? We have next to no intelligence on the ground. DAESH captures pick-up trucks and mortars faster than we can attack them.

Turkey and the Sunni Arabs haven’t committed more to the fight because they don’t believe Mr. Obama is committed.

Turkey and the Sunni Arabs haven’t committed more to the fight because they support DAESH. Turkey’s unleashing of Syrian refugees on Europe is a sign of a new, demographic strategy against the West. If the U. S. “redoubles its efforts” will the Turks continue to allow the U. S. to use Incirlik Air Base? It would be a good gauge of their intentions.

Mr. Obama should order the Pentagon to roll back Islamic State from all of its territory in Iraq and Syria as rapidly as possible, which means months not years. Kurds and Sunni Arabs will provide most of the fighters if the U.S. supplies the firepower, intelligence and political leadership.

See above on the Kurds. And the Sunni Arabs are on the other side.

This ought to include taking up the Turks and Jordan on their desire for safe zones in Syria to protect Sunnis who are fighting the Bashar Assad regime but aren’t radical jihadists.

There are no such. The anti-Assad Sunni Arab Syrian rebels aren’t taking prisoners. That’s a pretty good proxy for radicalism in my book. Besides, as noted above, the Assad regime is the state. Without it there will only be chaos in what used to be Syria. And chaos is the friend of DAESH.

11 comments… add one
  • TastyBits Link

    Turkey and the Sunni Arabs haven’t committed more to the fight because they support DAESH. …

    It is not possible that the WSJ do not know this. Their ignorance must be willful, and the only reason is because it spoils their narrative. They have no concern about the eventual outcome for the US. They are only concerned about their narrative prevailing.

    They are not the only ones.

  • ... Link

    I get their point about this being more alarming. Start shooting up some shopping malls in Ames, Iowa or Louisville, KY, or maybe a bar district it the Inner Harbor of Baltimore, or set off a couple of car bombs amidst the tail-gaiters at a UGA-UFL game in Jacksonville, Florida, and you’ll put more fear in the population as a whole.

    Yes, 9/11 was the nightmare big time scenario, but its scale means it would be hard to repeat. History since 9/11/2001 bares that out.

    But what if every time you stepped out of the house you had to worry about Abdul from down the street starting a massacre at your shopping market? Think the security costs* post-9/11 are high? Imagining hardening everything.

    Example: my wife hasn’t wanted to go to a shopping mall during the holiday season since September 2001. Now she really REALLY doesn’t want to go. One attack at the Mall of the Americas and nobody will want to go, at any time.

    * I mean costs, not effectiveness.

  • But what if every time you stepped out of the house you had to worry about Abdul from down the street starting a massacre at your shopping market?

    The U. S. being as it is I think if things got to that point Abdul would have moved to Canada.

  • ... Link

    The U. S. being as it is I think if things got to that point Abdul would have moved to Canada.

    Twenty years ago I would have agreed with you. Now I’m not so sure. After all, the worst people in America now are straight white people. See Dartmouth, Yale, Mizzou, Claremont (Claremont!) for examples of this. The President today made it clear that he wants more and more Syrian refugees brought into the country no matter what, and any white people that question that are un-American and should probably be shot.

    Honestly, Obama doesn’t even want to call it terrorism when the terrorists want to call it terrorism. And he won the Presidency twice. The future belongs to Abdul.

  • Twenty years ago I would have agreed with you.

    I could be behind the times. I still don’t think that Chicago is the same as the Upper West Side of New York. And most of California doesn’t have a lot in common with Marin County.

  • steve Link

    ” See Dartmouth, Yale, Mizzou, Claremont (Claremont!) for examples of this.”

    Yup. They shot up hundreds of people just like they did in Paris. Sigh.

    Anyway, the BS quotient in the WSJ piece is very high. The WH said what the intel community found, and they always made caveats about it being uncertain, about Benghazi. That is what about 8 different investigations, including the Senate and House investigations found. Once the intel community determined it was not primarily secondary to the movie, they said so.

    You hit most of the rest of the nonsense. I wonder if AIPAC wrote it for them? Maybe the RNC? The New American Century people? Re-invade Iraq. Ignore the fact that the Gulf states and Saudis are funding this. Ignore the fact that the Kurds are mostly interested in Kurdish territory and not being our cannon fodder. Ignore Turkey’s real role. So what if Assad’s government is the only legit actor. Moderates in Syria mean AQ, since they are moderate by comparison, and we want to support AQ? Finally, let’s just ignore the fact that Iran is actually fighting against DAESH.

    Steve

  • ... Link

    The point isn’t that they shot white people, you stupid fuck, it’s a question of who the villains are to modern Americans, and who, if anyone, they’re willing to fight.

    Goddamn, steve, but you are becoming as dishonest as Reynolds.

  • Since we’ve returned to the goings-on at various colleges, I don’t think the views being expressed there represent the views of all students at those college let alone those of their whole age cohort or all Americans. I think they represent a rather small number of radicalized activists and the others are just being bullied into submission since all they want is to pass the course to get the diploma to get the job. Then they’ll put it behind them.

    At public universities (like University of Missouri) I think that proper stewardship requires that faculty who persistently engage in consciousness raising rather than scholarship should be removed and I don’t much care how the tenure rules must be changed to effectuate that. The students are a tougher case but, clearly, something must be done if anything resembling academic freedom is to be maintained.

    Interest group studies were just getting their footing when I was an undergraduate and back then they were clearly forums for political organization rather than serious scholarship. Apparently, little has changed.

  • CStanley Link

    @ Dave- I think a major difference is that the school administrators sem completely cowed by these BLM activists. To take Dartmouth as just one example, there were 150 activists marching through the library causing disruption, screaming obscenities at white students and pushing some of them up against walls. I don’t know how long it went on but it sounds like there was ample time for campus security (at minimum) to have intervened. A conservative blogger (I forget who) who is an alum has written to the university president to ask if there will be consequences for the many students identifiable in videos, and so far no response.

    I don’t know, was their this level of enabling in the past?

  • Dartmouth is a private college and actions by alums will probably be more effective in motivating present administration than anything else.

    If it were a public university, I think that students who engage in violent hooliganism should be suspended and that repeat offenders should be expelled.

  • Guarneri Link

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