Remember Paris

The pundit world will spend the next week debating what went wrong to allow the Paris attacks to happen and how similar attacks there and elsewhere might be prevented. The culprits will include Edward Snowden (for inhibiting eavesdropping), Barack Obama (for not doing enough in Syria), George W. Bush (for invading Iraq), the Quran (for inspiring violence), Arab autocrats (for repressing their populations), France (for not integrating its Muslim population), multinational corporations (for globalization that has lowered wages and impoverished people worldwide), Russia (for intervening in Syria), the internet (for enabling recruitment of extremists) and at least a dozen other contributing forces and factors.

None of this will enlighten us much. The sad fact is that you and I can do precious little to protect ourselves from violence of this sort: weapons and explosives are readily available to those who want them in many countries, including the US. Nor can our governments do much more than they are already doing. Killing sprees that target random individuals can always get past the limited security defenses at a rock concert or the non-existent defenses at an outdoor cafe. The Paris attacks might have killed and wounded many more people. Once perpetrators open fire, only brave souls willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others–like the three Americans on a French train a couple of months ago–can stop the carnage before security forces arrive.

The American equivalent of the Paris attacks would be on the order of 600 people killed. That is fewer than 9/11, but getting up to the same order of magnitude. The effects in France and beyond will be dramatic: lowered tourism, tightened security measures, hindered travel, lower economic growth, strengthened nativist political movements, military retaliation, and likely more attempts to up the ante. We’ll return to the rhetoric of the “war on terror,” forgetting how misguided that idea was 14 years ago and the mistakes it led us to make.

Political violence is a technique, not an enemy.

Our enemy should be political extremism. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, as well as the downing of a Russian airliner over Sinai. If those claims are confirmed (I fully expect they will be), the enemy should be called by the name he uses: Muslim political extremism. The Islamic State is a self-declared mass murderer that targets civilians and aims to terrorize those it regards as its enemies into submission to its will, in particular by withdrawing from Muslim countries and leaving them to be welded into a caliphate ruled in accordance with a distorted interpretation of the Quran.

The irony is that Islamic State activities are discouraging Western withdrawal from the Middle East, not encouraging it. Most Americans (among them the President) would gladly leave Libya, Syria and Yemen to pursue their own civil wars, if they thought no harm would cross the Atlantic or the Mediterranean as a result. There really isn’t much in any of those benighted countries to attract American interest other than al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which may be able to kill random Americans at home and abroad but present no existential risk to the United States.

We have to remember Paris, in particular the victims. The French authorities need to prosecute the perpetrators, who surely go beyond the narrow circle of the already dead shooters. The American-led coalition should press the fight against the Islamic State’s military forces in Iraq and Syria. But we need to be careful not to do things that will make things worse: prejudice against Muslims as a group, denial of their equal and inalienable rights, and indiscriminate military or police attacks. Doing too much of the wrong things can be just as harmful as doing too little of the right things.