Four Important Lessons The World Must Learn From The Slaughter In Paris
John Bolton writes at AEI:
We should be immediately concerned that other attacks in prominent Western capitals, against senior European and U.S. government officials and the West generally may be in the offing.Second, we should not view the appropriate American and Western response as "bringing these terrorists to justice," in President Obama's words. This is not a matter for the criminal law, as many American political and academic leaders, including the President, have insisted, even after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
This is a war, as President Hollande has forthrightly called it, not a slightly enhanced version of thieves knocking over the corner grocery store within an ordered civil society. And the mechanism of response must be to destroy the source of the threat, not prosecute it, not contain it, not hope that we will "ultimately" destroy it. "Ultimately" is too far away.
Third, in light of Paris and the continuing threat of terrorism it so graphically conveys, we need a more sensible national conversation about the need for effective intelligence gathering to uncover and prevent such tragedies before they occur.
"Effective intelligence gathering" is not what we have at the airports. What we have is pretend security, absurdly treating every citizen as an equal risk of being a terrorist, that leaves us as sitting ducks for anybody who'd walk in the door of an airport with an AK-47.
What we need are highly-trained intelligence officers doing probable cause-driven policing.
The reality is, we cannot perfectly (or probably even adequately) protect ourselves from terrorism. What we can do is start being honest about what Islam calls for. Only when you define a threat can you figure out how to deal with it.
But here's what we have and are likely to continue having, from Mark Steyn:
Visiting the Bataclan, M Hollande declared that "nous allons mener le combat, il sera impitoyable": We are going to wage a war that will be pitiless.Does he mean it? Or is he just killing time until Obama and Cameron and Merkel and Justin Trudeau and Malcolm Turnbull fly in and they can all get back to talking about sea levels in the Maldives in the 22nd century? By which time France and Germany and Belgium and Austria and the Netherlands will have been long washed away.
Among his other coy evasions, President Obama described tonight's events as "an attack not just on Paris, it's an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share".
But that's not true, is it? He's right that it's an attack not just on Paris or France. What it is is an attack on the west, on the civilization that built the modern world - an attack on one portion of "humanity" by those who claim to speak for another portion of "humanity". And these are not "universal values" but values that spring from a relatively narrow segment of humanity. They were kinda sorta "universal" when the great powers were willing to enforce them around the world and the colonial subjects of ramshackle backwaters such as Aden, Sudan and the North-West Frontier Province were at least obliged to pay lip service to them. But the European empires retreated from the world, and those "universal values" are utterly alien to large parts of the map today.
And then Europe decided to invite millions of Muslims to settle in their countries. Most of those people don't want to participate actively in bringing about the death of diners and concertgoers and soccer fans, but at a certain level most of them either wish or are indifferent to the death of the societies in which they live - modern, pluralist, western societies and those "universal values" of which Barack Obama bleats. So, if you are either an active ISIS recruit or just a guy who's been fired up by social media, you have a very large comfort zone in which to swim, and which the authorities find almost impossible to penetrate.
via @Mark_J_Perry
But Amy! Effective would mean going to back to this! (Cue Coke's song)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/nyregion/police-unit-that-spied-on-muslims-is-disbanded.html?_r=0
/sarc
Bob in Texas at November 15, 2015 6:58 AM
""Effective intelligence gathering" is not what we have at the airports. What we have is pretend security, absurdly treating every citizen as an equal risk of being a terrorist, that leaves us as sitting ducks for anybody who'd walk in the door of an airport with an AK-47."
Umm, no.
The core of my arguments against Jeff Guinn's (and others') assertion - that airport "security" is preventing terror attacks - is that other agents are doing their job.
And to do that job means that you and I WILL NOT KNOW what they are doing, except by the continuing absence of attacks.
Sorry, everyone. Effective detective work is carried out in near-total secrecy. You and I do not and will not get to hear about it while it's going on, no matter what we think of ourselves or the wholly-fictional "public right to know".
Radwaste at November 15, 2015 10:34 AM
And to do that job means that you and I WILL NOT KNOW what they are doing, except by the continuing absence of attacks.
Which is as good a justification for our acquiescence to the burgeoning US police state as I can think of.
Grey Ghost at November 16, 2015 7:05 AM
"Which is as good a justification for our acquiescence to the burgeoning US police state as I can think of."
Not at all. Effective police work, though secret, still observes the rights of ordinary Americans while conducting investigation - even though police abuses occur with regularity.
Radwaste at November 17, 2015 1:30 PM
Radwaste: "And to do that job [preventing terror attacks] means that you and I WILL NOT KNOW what they are doing, except by the continuing absence of attacks."
No. If they were doing that job, terrorists would be getting arrested _before_ they got on an airplane (or otherwise in position to carry out an attack) and convicted of conspiracy to commit terrorist attacks. Instead, we see the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber thwarted by passengers on their airplanes, and the Tsarnaev brothers only detected after they bombed the Boston Marathon. The only successful prosecutions in the USA that weren't _after_ the attacks have been for "material support of terrorism", that is for giving money to the wrong organization. Even Jose Padilla, who was held incommunicado for three years for supposedly plotting to explode a dirty bomb, was only tried for material support.
markm at November 19, 2015 7:53 AM
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