BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | NOV 15
They are still counting the bodies in Paris: 129 dead, including a young college student from California, Nehomi Gonzalez, just 23. There were 362 wounded.
There were six simultaneous assaults in Paris by at least eight suicide commandos, seven of whom died and one apparently in jail in Belgium.
It was an internationally organized terrorist assault with effective command and control, accomplices in several countries (one assailant apparently made his way disguised as a refugee through Greece and Serbia). It was so unconscionable, uncivilized, but more tragically, no longer unimaginable.
It is the worst calamity in France since World War II. Pope Francis called it a piecemeal World War III. Think about it. Look at the context for his conclusion.
Current estimates are that 250,000 have died in just Syria alone.
More perish daily in Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Still more suffer man’s inhumanity to man all across Africa. Al-Shabab and Al-Qaida are spreading terror through Somalia, Chad, Kenya, Nairobi, and Mombasa.
Waves of humanity—millions of desperate, hungry, homeless, and frightened refugees—are still washing up on the shores of Europe, particularly Greece, a country that can’t help them, all seeking sanctuary from their war-ravaged homelands. Millions.
Passenger planes, a Malaysia Airlines flight with 298 souls aboard and a Russian airliner with 254 on board, shot from the skies over Ukraine and the Sinai Desert.
Men, women and children, all dead.
As has been the case elsewhere, the Paris assaults were barbaric. Innocent people just slaughtered. ISIS, the self-proclaimed executioners boasted about the deaths of “hundreds of pagans gathered for a concert of prostitution and vice, a “blessed battle” by the “soldiers of the caliphate.”
ISIS vowed more death, more brutality. “…the scent of death will not leave their nostrils.”
I believe them.
While I do not doubt the sincerity for one minute, I am not sure I can say the same for our President. President Obama said the US “will bring these terrorists to justice and go after any terrorist networks who go after our people. This is an attack, not just on Paris, not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.” This from a President who has told us we must throw out all of the preconceived notions about who is our enemy and who is our friend in the Mideast, to acknowledge a new world order.
The US and its allies continue to pick off terrorist leaders and figureheads. We apparently killed Jihadi John, the notorious beheader of American and European hostages. We also, according to the Washington Post, just killed “Wisam al Zubaidi, … an Iraqi dispatched to Libya… to build up the group’s affiliate there.” Our government tells us air strikes in Syria are having a positive impact and our Iraqi allies have just taken back the city of Sinjar from the extremists. President Obama is speaking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again.
It is doubtful that these exercises are making the barbarians at our gate shake in their desert boots.
French President Francois Hollande called the Paris attack an act of war. It certainly is, but it is one of many acts of war dating back more than 14 years, to which we have been responding in varying degrees preparing for battle, engaging in battle, withdrawing from battle, preparing and re-engaging and withdrawing and re-engaging again with no plan for victory, only containment. President Obama told George Stephanopoulos yet again: “What is true is that from the start our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them.”
Immediately thereafter, however, former CIA deputy director Mike Morrell told Stephanopoulos that containment was not working, especially since ISIS now has an attack capability in Europe. ABC Correspondent Martha Raddatz, one of the best in the business, said there are terrorist safe-haven training camps in Afghanistan that just handed out graduation photographs to newly minted jihadists. Demcratic California Congressman Adam Schiff, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said they have “too many resources against us” and “being on defense is not enough.” Containment?
Containment is what we fought to in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq twice, in Afghanistan, and now in the war on terrorism that we refuse to call a war, even though we promise ourselves over and over again that “we will do whatever it takes…to bring these terrorists to justice and to go after any terrorist networks who go after our people.”
If those words have any meaning at all, if our cause is victory for our way of life rather than the containment of those who seek to destroy it, then we must pay the price to strengthen our own defenses, invoke the mutual defense clause of our North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and we must demand that the United Nations assume the mantle of leadership that has been hanging in its closet since 1952, and act as a unified body against international barbarism. If not, we need to turn its New York headquarters into another rent-controlled apartment complex.
We must also focus on the unconventional strategies, just as ISIS and Al-Qaida have done. This must not be and is not a simple choice between limited, tactical warfare and “boots on the ground.” If it is, we lose.
Our strategy must evolve from one basic question: What is civilized society worth to us?
It is civilized society that our enemies are intent upon annihilating.
If Pope Francis is right about the early signs of World War III, and he may well be, we need powerful and decisive global leadership, the likes of which we have not had for a long time. We will need a global alliance of civilized people, regardless of their region, or ethnicity or religious belief. We will need to ask people everywhere to make the sacrifices necessary to not just cage, but kill this animal roaming freely through our forest.
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.