I find is sadly ironic that European governments and people excoriated the U.S. for over-reacting after 9/11, yet now that it has hit home in this way, although the dead number 140, not over 3,000, and the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe have not been reduced to rubble, France has suspended civil liberties to this extent.
This state of emergency under which the French are acting, and which Hollande proposes to extend, permits warrant less searches, curfews, etc. That never happened in the U.S. It would also be interesting to know what kind of interrogation techniques are being used. Mind you, I'm not necessarily quarreling with the French decisions.
It's just amazing how looking at the bullet riddled or blown apart bodies of your innocent neighbors, or people who might have been your friends throwing themselves out of skyscrapers to escape a fiery inferno, in our case, can change one's perspective.
One thing that is missing in the conversations in Europe perhaps, but is not missing in conversations in the U.S. , is how did ISIS grow from a few dozen fighters to the numbers we see today, and how did this refugee crisis get so out of hand.
A great part of the responsibility for all of this lies with Barack Obama and his policies, with which Europe was complicit. In fact, Europe was the first to withdraw from the mission. I'm not going to argue that it was a good idea to invade Iraq. Had the intelligence not showed that Iraq had WMD, I'm convinced that Bush would not have gone in. Having gone in you're then committed to the outcome. If you break it, you have a responsibility to not let the situation get worse. Iraq went so badly wrong in the beginning because President Bush, apparently under the advice of Rumsfeld, didn't put in the number of troops the generals requested. After President Bush, contrary to U.S. public opinion and all the Democrats (including Barack Obama) sent in more troops, the so called "surge", things stabilized. Once Obama came into office, it was all about fulfilling his promises to the American left to withdraw.
The U.S. has had tens of thousands of troops in between North Korea and South Korea since 1951. No one has proposed withdrawing them. There have always been thousands in Germany to deter the Russians.There was no reason that ten thousand or more troops couldn't have been kept in Iraq other than his, and the left's in general warped world view that the world's problems are the result of American control. The problems come when America doesn't lead. And I really don't want to hear that the Iraqi leader didn't want us there. When you telegraph to these leaders of unstable governments that you're going to leave them high and dry if not this month then in six months, what do you expect them to do? They're going to make a deal with whatever other strong force is willing to support them in maintaining power.
Had those troops been in place, ISIS could have been destroyed when they were still a rag tag bunch in the dessert. If Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had not totally bungled the Libya situation there would not have been that mass exodus into Europe. Had they had troops on the ground, or at least special forces, their bombing raids might have actually been able to drop bombs on real targets instead of coming back without having dropped a single bomb. I'm no big fan of John McCain for a lot of reasons, but five years ago he said that the U.S. and Nato should have created a no fly zone in the Near East for refugees where they would be safe while ISIS was dealt with. The thought was that it would be similar to the protected Kurdish areas. Had that been done, those hundreds of thousands of refugees wouldn't have headed for Europe. Had the Kurds been armed, some things might have been different. It's not that I don't understand the hesitation given the different Kurdish factions and being unclear about the ultimate motivations of some of them, but sometimes you have to deal with one risk at a time. They've been treading water in Syria for five years, just hoping to get through without an attack on U.S. soil and then dump the problem on the next President.
Now they've reaped the whirlwind, but not one word of apology for misguided decisions, seemingly no sense of guilt for the suffering of all these millions of people in the Near East, not one word about changing the strategy. Instead, we get a statement that the policy is WORKING, and that the Paris attacks are a SETBACK. It's sickening.
That also brings me to the NATO situation. NATO should be taking the lead on this. Why haven't they invoked Article 5? Is it because of Turkey? They should never have been allowed in NATO if that's the case. If you're not committed to the principles of NATO you shouldn't be in NATO. I sincerely hope that it isn't the Obama administration that is preventing this. What a disgrace if that's the case.
Ed. @Bicicleur,
If the mosque problem had been taken care of, then Hollande wouldn't be saying they may have to close some mosques. From what I understand, it's certainly still going on in Britain. Even in the U.S., the NYPD, the best in the world, in my opinion, in these matters, had a program directed at them, until our new idiot Democrat Mayor, DiBlasio, stopped it.
Ed. A word about the acceptance of refugees in the U.S. My heart breaks for these people, but the only ones who can be accepted are the ones for whom we have virtual certainty that they don't have terrorist ties. I'm afraid that means no single men, only family groups, and yes, CHRISTIAN family groups should receive priority. What are people thinking? When records are scant, you do profiling. Profiling works. Ask the Israelis. Christian families coming with their local priest in village groups DON'T FIT THE PROFILE. Have people lost all common sense?
Superb post !
