Sadly, the photographs in the media seemed familiar: people
running in fright, a woman huddled in the arms of police officers,
EMT’s carrying a wounded man to an ambulance, people kneeling and lighting
candles.
And then came the photographs from
around the world: flowers laid in front of an embassy; soccer players in Peru
standing in a line, arms around one another’s shoulders, in a moment of silence
before a game. The sails on the Sidney Opera House, the top of the World Trade
Center, City Hall in San Francisco, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the Tower
Bridge in London, the Pearl tower in Shanghai, lit in France’s red, white, and
blue.
Buildings and monuments in Taipei, Stockholm, Salamanca, Tel
Aviv, Mexico City, Madrid, Bratislava, Brussels, Warsaw,
all lit in the French colors. Amazon’s home page displaying the French flag and
the simple declaration “Solidarité.”
“Today,” said Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, “we are all France.”
Well, we are all France for a few days, at least. But each
country has its own problems and distractions (including Rajoy’s,
where the Catalan separatist movement threatens to pull his nation apart). What
the November 13 Paris attacks reminded us is that we all share the problem of
terrorists’ threats.
And so we’re back to the days after 9/11, when all the world was American. And just as we had choices then,
as a country and as a member of an international community, we have choices
now. And what we do matters.
But do what? When we’re faced with something as complex and
horrifying as terrorism, there’s an understandable tendency – almost a
psychological need – to toss the burden of decision to Washington, to recoil
from the heavy individual responsibilities of citizenship.
But that’s one thing we can’t do. Just as for the ordinary
human beings we send to Washington to act on our behalf, this is a time for us to
become informed, weigh the options, understand the consequences. To pay
attention, and to let elected representatives hear from us.
And it’s a time to guard against anti-Muslim prejudice.
Muslims have been victims of Isis brutality in the Middle East. And in France –
and in the US – prejudice against Muslims is real and dangerous. In the wake of
the Paris attacks, we can’t let it flourish.
Several other things seem clear. The simple response to
terrorism (and we’re already seeing this coming from the mouths of politicians)
is to just go get ’em, wipe ISIS off the face of the
earth – and not let anyone cross our borders. But we can’t react from our gut,
letting anger and fear crowd out careful analysis. We can’t sit back and let
France (or Europe) act on its own. Nor can we, if we are struck again, act on
our own.
Debates about the best response to
terrorism will involve much more than consideration of the use of military
force. Better minds than mine may know exactly how we should respond. Right
now, I’m just trying to learn what I can. And reading through conservative and
liberal commentaries about the Paris attacks, I came across several
thought-provoking pieces that I’ve saved for more consideration.
YaschaMounk,
writing
at slate.com, warns of the danger that Islamophobia will increase. But
he also warns about a problem on the left: the reluctance to accept that
religious extremism is at the root of some of this horror. Can we talk about
that without stereotyping a major religious faith?
Robert Kuttner, writing
in The American Prospect, suggests that “the new wave of attacks on
seemingly random soft targets, by an array of home-grown, freelance terrorists
who are unknown to police, and inspired but not necessarily managed by ISIS,
really does signal a new normal, in which civilians are subject to random
attack anywhere.”
Despite the “disturbing and far-flung surveillance apparatus”
that the federal government put in place after 9/11, Kuttner
writes, “the new national security state did not touch the vast majority of
Americans most of the time.” But with the Paris attacks, straddling the need to
protect the United States and protect its values – its constitutional
principles – “just became harder – on both fronts,” says Kuttner.
“Defense is now harder, and so is reconciling it with openness.”
Kuttner lays out “some topics to
ponder.” Among them:
• Civil
liberties and surveillance. Many liberals have been convinced, Kuttner notes, that securing the
country doesn’t require us to give up civil liberties. Were we wrong? “This is
genuinely tough stuff,” writes Kuttner, “which
requires both executive leadership and unrelenting public probing.”
• Our
relationship with Russia. Do we need to set our concerns about Vladimir Putin
aside and work with him to combat ISIS – even if that means helping him
shore up Assad in Syria?
And from Paul
Krugman in the Times, a caution against exaggerating the threat from
terrorism – which, he says, “we shouldn’t dignify” by using the word “war.”
“The point is not to minimize the horror,” Krugman writes.
“It is, instead, to emphasize that the biggest danger terrorism poses to our
society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses
it can inspire.”
One of those wrong-headed responses: trying “to achieve
perfect security by eliminating every conceivable threat – a response that
inevitably makes things worse, because it’s a big, complicated world, and even
superpowers can’t set everything right,” Krugman writes.
One last thing: It’s important, I
think, to remember that as a nation, we are citizens of the world. And there
are important international principles and laws that we should adhere to. On
The Nation’s website on Saturday, Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for
Policy Studies, issued
“a call for justice – not vengeance.”
Shortly after 9/11, she wrote, IPS and some of its allies
published a statement noting that although the 9/11 attacks were directed at
this country, terrorism “knows no borders.”
“Our best chance for preventing such devastating acts of
terror,” the statement said, “is to act decisively and cooperatively as part of
a community of nations within the framework of international law to root out
terrorism and work for justice at home and abroad.”
“We affirm that the United States is a nation of laws, rooted
in fundamental American values of democracy, justice, human rights, and respect
for life,” said the statement. “The laws that protect our civil liberties and
freedoms in the United States are part of what define us as a nation. They must
not be abridged; to do so would offer victory to those who wrought these
vengeful acts.”
And yet in our response to 9/11, Bennis wrote, those rights
were abridged (“Worse than abridged, they were crushed”) as we tortured people,
kept prisoners detained without respect to their rights, let our government spy
on our own citizens, killed civilians in drone attacks, and engaged in racial
profiling and detention of Muslims, Arabs, and Arab-Americans.
As Robert Kuttner said, this is
“genuinely tough stuff.” Do we sometimes have to place national security above
civil liberties? When? Who decides? And what about
international law? What about agreements we’ve made with other nations?
Sunday night brought the news that French warplanes had launched
an attack on ISIS strongholds in Syria. Maybe as a result, the leadership of
ISIS, if there is such a thing as a concentrated leadership, will be destroyed.
Maybe the Paris attacks won’t be repeated somewhere else anytime soon. But I
think that ISIS, and terrorism, may be much more complex than that.
We seemed to have wiped out Al Qaeda’s leadership, but then
we got offshoots, and ISIS. This is not the kind of threat we have faced in the
20th century, in which we joined with other nations, sent our soldiers into
battle overseas, worried, grieved over losses, and then welcomed them home.
This is a different world.
Since 9/11, we have submitted to long lines at airports, to
removing our shoes and opening our bags for inspection and being patted down by
security personnel. And no more airplanes have hit buildings on our soil. But
now there have been two attacks in Paris, this one worse than the assault on
Charlie Hebdo’s irreverent staff. If it happened in Paris, how unlikely is it
that it will happen here? What would it take to prevent that? And are we
willing to do whatever elected officials say it will take? To give up whatever
rights we are told we have to give up?
Genuinely tough stuff indeed. But
this is no time for simplistic solutions. And it is no time for shirking our
responsibilities, expecting Washington to perform our personal duties as
citizens. We elect a new president in less than a year.
This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2015.
The answers aren’t clear to the average US citizen and frankly they aren’t meant to be.
Formulating a correct response requires beginning with some uncomfortable truths – ISIL is direct and anticipated (according to DoD forecasting years ago) outcome of our policy in Syria, and that of our allies in the region. Are we to believe the ISIL could have survived and indeed prospered under serious countermeasures by the US military for over a year? Are we to believe this flood of refugees or terrorist blowback comes as a surprise to our foreign policy wizards? The real surprise is how few attacks take place when most do not require sophisticated networks to pull off. Our homegrown active shooters demonstrate with numbing regularity how easy it is to get into a crowded area with a firearm and cause mayhem.
The RF have exposed our lackluster bombing campaign as a sham, causing more harm to ISIL in a few weeks than we have in a year. In stark contrast to nearly every US involvement going back to the former Yugoslavia, they actually operate within the confines of International law.
Assad is no boyscout, but when you consider his army is primarily Sunni, he clearly isn’t holding the boat together with nothing but a whip. The majority in Syria support him, at least compared to the alternative. What could be more hypocritical than our own State Dept or WH claiming that he must go due to his brutality, this from a political and defense establishment that has admitted to torture, murder, sodomy, enabling of rapist pedophiles on US combat bases etc etc and with only whistleblowers jailed for any of it.
If we’re serious about trashing ISIL, we should roll up our sleeves and join the Russian Federation to get it done. Or we can simply shut up, step aside and do nothing short of preventing Turkey from initiating a regional war. At the pace things are happening now, Syria and Iraq will be cleared of ISIL in short order by the actors currently involved. The refugee problem can then largely be solved with a massive rebuilding effort that will still be less trouble than distributing them globally to countries far from their shattered homeland.
Many of our most insidious adversaries on this planet are former or current CIA projects run amok – in the case of ISIL, with accurate foreknowledge. In a very real sense, our intelligence services are creating the enemies our government is encouraging us to fear, and our conventional forces are tasked with combating – doing so at great cost in blood and money at a time when our government is already saddled with a debt impossible to clear, shrinking revenue and real unemployment approaching 20%.
We have given up more than enough of our liberties – one cannot be “protected” and free at the same time. Freedom entails risk. We can best minimize this sort of risk by realistically assessing the outcome of our foreign policies – currently a string of disasters going back more than a decade – before they turn into hellish blunders.
We cannot expect our representatives in Washington to come up with a sane way forward – they (both parties) created this mess as a matter of policy! I agree it is time to exercise our personal duties as citizens and demand good government. This won’t yield results without a critical mass understanding how we’ve gotten to the state we’re in.
Shame on Louise Slaughter and her vote against the Syrian refugees. Her vote was a
vote in favor of more hate and fear. The last thing we need now is more hate.
What’s next? A vote to return the Statue of Liberty to France?? And how appropriate that would be since France is still welcoming Syrian refugees.
Finally! This is the first time I can remember that Louise Slaughter voted for any legislation I agreed with. She has been such a knee-jerk liberal Washington insider and Obama supporter I almost wonder what they had done with the real Louise. Chalk it up to a sudden epiphany of common sense or re-election posturing.
A question remains. Why do we applaud immediate legislation for foreign terrorist issues, but in the US countless children can be killed by homegrown terroists and nothing is done. Why? Are the deaths of American children at the hands of American terrorists less important than the deaths caused by foreign terrorists?
Tom asks “Are the deaths of American children at the hands of American terrorists less important than the deaths caused by foreign terrorists?”
That’s analogous to minority communities thinking that the deaths of minorities at the hands of police are much more important than deaths of minorities at the hands of those same minorities.
I’m not saying either view is right — just pointing out the analogy. And that maybe it’s a fact of life — that deaths at the hands of one’s own aren’t treating as significant as deaths at the hands of “outsiders”.