Bodies are seen on the ground on Friday after at least 80 people were killed in Nice, France, when a truck ran into a crowd celebrating the Bastille Day.
When, exactly, did France become our front line in the war on terror?
Was it after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January 2015, when 12 people were killed at their desks and in a kosher grocery store? Was it in the wave of November violence over forty-eight hours in the Stade de France and the Parisian suburbs?
Or was it Thursday, in Nice, an L.A.-lookalike city on the Riviera? A madman plowed his truck into a mile’s worth of Bastille Day revelers, killing at least 84 and wounding dozens.
If Nice turns out to be the work of Islamic extremists -– and jihadis are celebrating on social media –- it will solidify France’s status as target No. 1.
It is in the crosshairs for three reasons, and a few inconvenient Donald Trump truths.
France is 7% to 9% Muslim, mostly immigrants and descendants of immigrants from its North African empire, in a population of 66 million. It does not do a good job of integrating them.
Along with the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, France, is symbolized by the banlieus, the famously isolated Muslim tenements in the Paris suburbs. That is a significant recruiting pool for radical Islamic groups, like al Qaeda and ISIS. Because terrorism of any sort appeals to only a fraction of the population, to a certain extent it is a numbers game. The bigger the pool, the more terrorists and lone wolves. Even if they are only a handful.
France is a cultural target also. More than Italy, more than Germany,
more even than the United Kingdom, there is a uniquely French mode of
hedonism that is not quite synonymous with the Western world.
Sayyed Qutb, a radical Islamic author who inspired generations of militants, wrote savagely of the licentiousness of America, and called for a remedy of political Islam. His critique was wrong about many things; but all the worldliness it hated about America was to be found perhaps double
in France. The country's 35-hour work week is an American cliché for
Continental sloth and leisure, but it does speak to a mode of life
that values living, above all.
The French are a target for a third reason, as well. They are seen as vulnerable. Americans had some good laughs at France’s expense before
People being evacuated on rue Oberkampf near the Bataclan concert hall in central Paris, early on Nov. 14, 2015, a day after at least 120 people were killed in a series of terror attacks. (MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Its reluctance to overthrow Saddam
Hussein, combined with its humiliating six-week collapse to the Germans
in 1940 make the French into international symbols of weak-willed
pacifism.
But they weren’t that. Terrorist suspects in France have
fewer rights than almost anywhere else in the Western world. They
face a combination judge-prosecutor who can approve his own warrants
People hold placards reading "Je suis Charlie" (I am Charlie) during a silent gathering in Nice in January 2015. (SEBASTIEN NOGIER/EPA)
and detain suspects several days without charges. The French dropped
the hammer on al Qaeda’s rogue state in Mali in 2013 and bombed
Moammar Khadafy out of power in 2011. They fought for a decade in
Afghanistan.
At home, the French take threats to Paris and Nice very seriously. You rarely see American police in balaclavas. But in France it is not uncommon. They are fighting multiple wars overseas for all the right reasons, but it paints a target on their backs.
Attacks like those in Nice and Paris will not destroy France. But
they might well cut it adrift. French President Francois Hollande
French President Francois Hollande must take more aggressive action against the Islamic State than the U.S. (FRANCOIS MORI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
must now take more aggressive action against the Islamic State than
the United States has countenanced to date. President Obama’s
slow-and-steady strategy against ISIS may err on the side of caution,
but the longer ISIS stands, the longer it remains a symbol. And
Hollande, in the crosshairs, cannot abide any more dead in his country.
Andrew Peek is a former US Army intelligence officer and a professor at Pepperdine University.
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