Paris

No one condones a terrorist attack. And yet, it's difficult to have a rational discussion about what to do. There is no simple answer--we can't just bomb them out of existence. Emotion gets in the way of fact, and I wasn't even aware of the attack in Beirut just the day before Paris. Yet only the latter is worthy of a national TV tribute. And it's rather jarring to watch that and be yanked right back into the comedy afterward.

There's a long and complicated history that we ignore at our peril. Ben Norton offers some perspective.

It was the U.S.-led war in and occupation of Iraq that created the conditions of extreme violence, desperation, and sectarianism in which al-Qaeda metastasized, spreading worldwide. The West, in its addiction to militarism, played into the hands of the extremists, and today we see the rotten fruit borne of that rotten addiction: ISIS is the Frankenstein’s monster of Western imperialism.

The Paris attacks, as horrific as they are, could be a moment to think critically about what our governments are doing both abroad and here at home. If we do not think critically, if we act capriciously, and violently, the wounds will only continue to fester. The bloodletting will ultimately accelerate.

Patrick Smith:

Yes, what has just occurred in Paris is an affront to all of us. But to invoke universal values is to sustain the error of understanding, of recognition, of acknowledgement, that lies at the heart of all this incessant hatred, attack and counterattack. ... [T]here is little ground to claim that they have determined how we have acted in the Middle East and treated its people

Update (November 16):  Paul Rosenberg criticizes Republican Presidential candidates for talking about a "clash of civilizations".

It’s war of barbarism against civilization—except for one thing. We started it.

Update (November 17):  Smith follows up with more history to argue against the "decontextualization" Richard Perle advocated.

This is where the Richard Perle ethos gets us. Over time it leaves us ignorant such that we grasp less and less of the world around us. We do not know how to behave properly.

Ultimately Middle Eastern societies must be left to find their own ways, each one by itself. It is not an original thought. The West’s task, speaking very broadly, is to stop doing a lot of what it has been doing and start doing things it has neglected. In the latter category this means an emphatically disinterested effort—a long campaign, the kind that would be a feature of our time the way colonization was—dedicated to repairing the political, social, economic and cultural damage inflicted in the past.

Update (November 18):  In formulating a response (not just a reaction), we need to take a hard look at ourselves. Ben Norton reviews the history of U.S. intervention. Daniel Denvir examines our dark side of racism and rage.

ISIS and right-wing Westerners seek a similar goal of a world starkly divided between Muslim and Christian. Between us and them. An attack by one side always props up the other, a violent feedback loop that pushes each side away from one another and into fortified camps, stigmatizing diversity and making it dangerous. It’s a war where both opposing sides are constantly winning.

Here's one view of the complexity:

Update (November 30):  Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn describes the Iraq War as "a huge error" that lead to the creation of ISIS.

Update (December 3):  Thomas Piketty makes a connection between economic inequality and terrorism.

Update (December 12):  In an interview, Noam Chomsky discusses the Paris attack. "If you want to end [terrorism], the first question you ask is: why did it take place?"

Paul Rosenberg notes that the U.S. tops the list for the number of armed conflicts in the past two hundred years--most of them undeclared interventions. And we're paid a price for our addiction to war as the Hart-Rudman Commission found out in the late 90s. According to Senator Gary Hart, “We got a terrific sense of the resentment building against the U.S. as a bully, which alarmed us.” Those Commission reports were ignored in 2001.

There was, after all, another way. 9/11 was not an act of war. It was a crime. And we could have treated it as such. Doing so would have meant strengthening and intensifying international law, as a means for putting all those responsible for 9/11 on trial. A trial in which the utter innocence of thousands of victims would have shamed and humiliated the perpetrators so thoroughly that no one would ever think to follow them again. The exact opposite of a war in which we created thousands of innocent victims of our own, completely destroying the moral foundations of superiority that Kennan’s [containment strategy] rightly saw as fundamental.

This was the low-conflict path we turned our backs on. Rather than taking a path that has increasingly pitted security against individual rights and freedom, we could have taken that path, instead–a path that strengthened both. What we failed to do was to learn from our past mistakes—and that can only be done by those who are confident enough to admit to past mistakes, face up to them and make the necessary changes. We missed our chance to do this after 9/11, and the devastating attacks on Paris are just the most obvious bitter fruits of that missed chance. The 134 secret wars Turse wrote about are less obvious to us, perhaps, but no less bitter to those who die in them.

If we were really as good as we claim to be, wouldn’t we be good enough to face up to our mistakes—and begin to act to change them? If we can answer that one question, face that one challenge, then all the rest of them—however difficult—will be easy in comparison. Because we will have reclaimed our moral center, finally, after all these years.