Celebrating an Anniversary Through Terrorism

The editors of the Wall Street Journal comment on the multiple terrorist attacks that took place late last week:

Jihadists have a fondness for anniversaries, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by three terror attacks, on three continents, all taking place on the eve of the Islamic State’s declaration of a caliphate last June 29. That makes the prospect of follow-on strikes through Monday that much more plausible—and more difficult to stop.

ISIS took credit for only one of the three atrocities—a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in Kuwait, in which at least 27 people were killed. But their near-simultaneity suggested some kind of coordination, or at least joint inspiration. Ramadan began last week, and an ISIS spokesman recently called on “mujahadeen everywhere” to make it “a month of disasters for the infidels.”

Coordinated or not, ISIS’s trademark hyper-brutality has made its mark on jihadi minds. In Tunisia a gunman posing as a tourist killed at least 37 people, many of them European vacationers, at a beach resort. In France terrorists were less successful but no less bloody-minded: A car-bombing attempt at an American-owned chemical plant near Lyon failed to cause major damage, but not before the alleged attacker, Yassine Salhi, planted the decapitated head of his boss on the plant’s gate, along with an Islamic flag.

All of this is a stark reminder that the Middle East is no Las Vegas: What happens there doesn’t stay there. Tunisians make up the largest contingent of foreign fighters in ISIS, which took credit for murdering 21 people at a Tunis museum in March. Thousands of Europeans, and an estimated 180 Americans, have gone to fight for ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and Western security officials will not be able to track all of them. That increases the possibility of mass-casualty attacks by well-trained killers, as opposed to the more inept recent attempts by lone-wolf jihadists in Texas and Massachusetts.

Friday’s attacks should cause some rethinking from so-called civil libertarians in Congress and the White House, who have competed to hobble and dismantle the National Security Agency’s antiterror surveillance capabilities.

That is a laughable segue. There is no evidence whatever that the NSA’s “antiterror surveillance capabilities” have brought three sigma security and there is evidence, thoughtfully provided by DHS itself, that it hasn’t brought even brought one sigma. Basically, the precautions taken over the last 15 years have been mostly theater and not particularly effective theater that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of people as well. The evidence for abuse is actually stronger than the evidence for success as far as the NSA is concerned.

One of these days we’ll come around to the view that the only solution to attacks that arise through personal empowerment is personal empowerment. But that’s a dangerous thought.