With every politician in France channelling Clint Eastwood, you might think that the “eradication” of this Islamic terrorist group is just a few bombing sorties away.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Revenge-driven aerial bombing campaigns may make the French think something is being done about the Paris attacks — until the next attack. After all, the country was still recovering from the shock of the Charlie Hebdo massacre when this latest atrocity hit.
Bottom line? France has just twelve fighter jets operating in Iraq and Syria. All the heavy lifting in the aerial campaign is being done by the Americans. For all the Gaullist rhetoric coming out of Versailles, France doesn’t have the capacity in-theatre to play Patton.
But the more relevant question is whether a strategy of “eradication” works. Fourteen years of boots on the ground in Afghanistan should have shown the United States that it doesn’t. Two superpowers — the USSR, then the U.S. — tried the military option for 24 years; Afghanistan remains an unreconstructed narco-state with the Taliban back in business and Kabul as corrupt as ever.
Boots on the ground accomplished even less in Iraq. Revisit in your memory President George Bush strutting across the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in September 2003 beneath a banner declaring “Mission Accomplished.” It was War on Terror rhetoric at its most perverse. Thirteen years on, that “war on a noun” is still an utter failure.
Baghdad is a shadow of its former self, capital of a country that exists only on maps. Farmers in southern Iraq are turning from rice to poppy cultivation. Iraq has splintered into deadly factions and is sinking into what looks like a regional civil war — the late Osama bin Laden’s goal. Back in Saddam Hussein’s day, there were no jihadists in Iraq. Now there is ISIS, which President Obama himself admits was created by the blundering U.S. invasion of Iraq.
And what is ISIS, really? It’s nothing but the lineal descendant of terrorist groups that, for particular reasons, popped up in various places under various names in recent history. Go back 40 years and there was no ISIS or al Qaida — but there was the Abu Nidal Organization operating out of the Middle East, the provisional IRA in Ireland, the Red Brigades in Italy and — one of the deadliest of them all — the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany.
You stand a better chance of being struck by lightning than of dying at the hands of a terrorist — but most governments see a hidden benefit in exaggerating the threat. After every attack attributed to terrorists, governments take another step towards the complete surveillance state. France is no exception. In the wake of the Paris attacks, French President François Hollande has asked to change the Constitution of the Fifth Republic.
He wants to change Article 36 — which allows the government to declare “a state of siege” in the event of an attack and transfer powers to the military — and Article 16, which allows the president to grant himself “exceptional powers” in dire circumstances. The changes would allow the executive to activate a state of emergency as it would a state of siege — without parliamentary approval. We’ve already gone down the “extraordinary powers” road here in Canada with Bill C-51; in the United States they called it the Patriot Act.
The journey towards global surveillance rides the bullet train of fear and prejudice. The more speed it picks up, the further democracy recedes in the rear-view mirror. The National Security Agency spied on all American citizens with its collection of so-called ‘metadata’ — something Americans would still know nothing about were it not for a fellow named Edward Snowden, now a fugitive in exile for alerting his countrymen to the 21st century version of Watergate.
After thirteen years, the War on Terror has cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives — and now there is ISIS. There is no doubt that a superior Western military force could vanquish ISIS on the blood-soaked battlefields of the Middle East — provided the nations fielding those soldiers saw the job as long-term. But the West has already won those kinds of hollow victories without changing the equation in the region. If ISIS were to be militarily driven out of the Levant, it likely would re-emerge in Africa or Asia. It might undergo a name change. It might move more deeply into the shadows. But it wouldn’t disappear.
So what can be done? Some people think it’s a good idea to place whole communities under special surveillance. But that comes dangerously close to racial profiling, with all its ugly consequences. Recent attacks on Muslims and mosques in Canada demonstrate where placing whole communities of people under suspicion can lead.
It’s equally wrong to lump all Syrian refugees in with Canada’s terror problem. The vast majority are just desperate people fleeing a desperate situation. That famous picture of the little boy washed up on a Turkish beach, Alan Kurdi, seemed to deliver that message. Then, images from the Paris aftermath turned many people against refugees and immigrants. Thank God that Vancouver’s Temple Shalom and true leaders like Rabbi Dan Moskovitz have extended a helping hand to sponsor Muslim families.
The most sensible way to deal with terrorists is to stop characterizing them as fanatics or mentally unstable. As former CIA officer Philip Giraldi says, all terrorists are members of political movements. They have grievances and goals which need to be understood rather than caricatured. Otherwise, we have no way to intervene against them other than the sharp edge of the sword — always an excellent recruitment tool for outfits like ISIS.
Besides, we have a way of dealing with mass murderers already. It’s called the criminal justice system.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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