What is there to say about the Paris attacks?
First of all, France had a wake–up call in January with the Charlie
Hebdo attack in which radical gunmen in Paris killed 11 people and wounded
another 11. There was worldwide angst about that at the time, at least for a
few days, but France doesn’t appear to have changed any of its security policies
significantly as a result of that attack.
For the world at large, clearly there is a double standard
running – we are all aghast at the Paris attacks on Friday, in which 128 people
died. On the other hand the world news barely
mentioned the attack on the college in Kenya last Thursday in which jihadist
gunmen killed 147 people. And of course the world hasn’t shown nearly the same
level of angst about the tens of thousands ISIS has been killing steadily
within Syria and Iraq. Perhaps that is to be expected. Despite the rhetoric,
the world’s actions clearly show we don’t care that much about what ISIS does,
as long as it doesn’t do it in our own countries.
Yes, the President has authorized a few bombing attacks – 10 or 20 a day – but that is clearly just a token effort to show that the
administration is “doing something”. It is hardly a strategy, despite the
president’s repeated assurances that it is. Now that we are beginning to supply
effective arms to some of the rebels, perhaps we are beginning to do something
more effective, but clearly the administration doesn’t have a real strategy yet.
President Obama has apparently underestimated the ISIS threat all along, as his
“Junior Varsity” comment in January 2014 showed.
At a strategic level, there are at least five things to
note:
1. Modern open Western societies are incredibly vulnerable
to these sorts of attacks against soft targets like sports events and concerts and
shopping malls and other places where lots of people gather. And these
societies are also pretty vulnerable to infrastructure attacks against power
grids, communications facilities, transportation systems, water supplies, etc,
etc. It is hard to see how this can change without becoming a Soviet-style
police state. So “defending” against these sorts of attacks in an open society will
always be difficult, and not always successful.
Get used to it.
2. The more zealous right-wingers are all for going into
Iraq and Syria and just wiping ISIS out.
It sounds great, but in fact we had half a million American and allied
troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than a decade, and had no more luck stamping
out the extremists than the Russians did in 1979-1989, or than the British did
in 1839-1842. The right-wing ought to learn its history, lest it is forced to
repeat it – yet again!
3. The root of the problem is a swelling population of young
Arab men with no realistic prospects of a job or family or purpose in life, who
are ripe for recruitment by charismatic extremists into a movement that gives
them some purpose and stature in their own eyes. This whole problem will not go
away until the world finds some solution to the underlying economic
impoverishment in these Arab countries, and in the ghettos of the diaspora in Europe.
Of course the autocratic kleptocracies that rule most of the Arab nations make the problem
worse.
4. The problem is not the Muslim religion. The Muslim religion (somewhat distorted) gets
used because they are already Muslim, and there is an existing sectarian divide
between Sunnis and Shia that can be exploited, so it is a convenient lever. If these young men were all Christians, no
doubt these same charismatic leaders could find ample support in the Bible for
their purposes (remember “an eye for an eye”?).
We certainly have had enough bloody Christian extremists though history to
prove the point. If religion wasn’t available as a tool, no doubt nationalism or
some political ideology like communism or fascism would work as well. Once the unrest is there, waiting to be used,
charismatic leaders can always find a plausible cause to drive recruitment and
fire up the troops.
5. This war is being waged as much in the public and social media
as on the battlefield, a fact which ISIS clearly understands but which the West
seems not yet to have fully grasped. To
win this war (and war it is) we in the West need to get as good as ISIS at
using media in the battle. In fact, future wars in general will probably incorporate
media manipulation as a key weapon, and we had better learn that and prepare
for it. President Putin, in his Ukrainian
adventures, has been quite effective using the media to keep the West divided
in its response and therefore largely ineffective.
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