Understanding the Paris Attacks and War with Radical Islam

A devastating series of coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris last week has set the Western world on edge. Here in America, Saturday night's Democratic Presidential debate was reformulated to put more emphasis on the events, while a Florida forum and the Sunday morning talk shows featured responses from Republican candidates. Let's review what happened and what it means for American foreign policy in the big picture.

Paris

Last Friday evening, there were three separate suicide bombings outside of a suburban Paris stadium, followed by mass shootings and a suicide bombing at four different downtown locations. The official death toll was 129 victims plus 7 dead attackers. A total of 415 people were reported injured. The Islamic State claimed credit for the attacks, which were reportedly retaliation for French bombing of Islamic targets as part of their involvement in the Syrian Civil War. The attacks come on the heels of twin suicide bombings in Beirut two days prior, and the bombing of a Russian commercial airliner on October 31.

The Players

For many Americans, the most complicated aspect of the conflict is understanding who is who. The media insists on calling the Islamic State by various different names including ISIS, ISIL and now Daesh. ISIS stood for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, while ISIL stood for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, which refers to a historical term for a larger eastern Mediterranean region, that historically included what is today Israel.


What is a caliphate?

A caliphate is a form of Islamic government, in which the leader, called the Caliph, is considered a political and religious successor to the Islamic prophet Muhammad and ruler of the entire Muslim world. It dates back about 1,400 years, but has not been asserted since the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire and their Army of the Caliphate were defeated by Mustafa Kemal AtatŸrk (the first President of Turkey) in 1922.

This modern assertion of a caliphate was made in 2014 by the Islamic State's purported leader, a man known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Al-Baghdadi is an Iraqi in his mid 40s who has been on the State Department's Most Wanted Terrorist list since a $10 million reward was put on his head in 2011. He is a sadistic authoritarian known for rape, torture and indiscriminate killing. Al-Baghdadi made mainstream U.S. news when it was discovered that he had taken American humanitarian worker Kayla Mueller, who was captured in 2013 while leaving a Doctors Without Borders facility in Syria, as his "wife," repeatedly raping the young girl from Arizona before she was killed in a bombing attack.

The importance of his self-perceived authority over the Islamic world is that he believes it gives him not only ruling authority over his followers and what they believe to be their territory (which does not respect legal borders of Islamic countries), but also the right to punish other Muslims who have not pledged allegiance to the caliphate for being apostates. Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammed Al-Adnani reportedly said, "Beware of splitting the ranks. Those who want to split the ranks, strike their heads with bullets."

Who does the Islamic State consider itself at war with?


Where is the Islamic State based out of?

Primarily in Syria and Iraq, as well as Egypt and Lebanon.

What do Syrian refugees have to do with it?

French authorities say that at least one of the slain terrorists entered France posing as a Syrian refugee. Another had a Syrian passport that may have been counterfeited. The brutal civil war in Syria has led to millions of Syrian refugees pouring across borders into places like Turkey, Germany and France. Last week's attacks have many people throughout the United States worried that accepting refugees from Syria comes at an unacceptable risk to national security, especially given how difficult it is to do background checks on applicants given the country's state of disarray.

In September, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the U.S. would accept 85,000 Syrian refugees in 2016 and 100,000 more the following year. In the wake of the French attacks, Republican Presidential candidates are now unanimously calling for some sort of suspension of the admittance of Syrian refugees into the United States, with Texas Senator Ted Cruz suggesting that we should only allow those we determine to be Christians to enter. Several American governors, including Florida’s Rick Scott, say they will not allow Syrian refugees into their state.

On Monday, President Obama called idea of screening Syrian refugees based on religion "shameful," and said that the United States would continue to accept refugees from Syria, though "only after subjecting them to rigorous screening and security checks."

"Slamming the door in their faces would be a betrayal of our values," the President said while speaking in Turkey during the G-20 summit this week. "Our nations can welcome refugees who are desperately seeking safety and ensure our own security. We can and must do both."

France had been on high alert since the January 2015 attacks in Paris that killed 17 people, including civilians and police officers, most notably at the offices of the satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had published cartoons featuring the prophet Muhammad, whose depiction is forbidden in some interpretations of the religion. Credit for that attack, however, was claimed by an Al-Qaeda/Nusra Front group in Yemen, which, as I stated earlier, is an enemy of the Islamic State, rather than part of it. At this point, it seems the world of radical Islamic terrorism has two distinct and opposing factions, making coherent strategies more complicated to devise.

What are the military options?

For a host of reasons I detailed extensively in a previous column, the situation in Syria is not one in which a simple solution is possible. For starters, there simply is no good first choice in terms of who to back. The situation is further complicated by competing interests between Russia and the United states, both of whom see the Islamic State as a dangerous threat, but have very different visions of what a post civil war Syria would look like (Russia’s with Assad back in power and the U.S. unsure of its endgame in light of its spectacular failure in arming and training a rebel force).

However, with the attacks on France, this clearly becomes more than a Syria problem for all involved. The Islamic State, who President Obama had called "contained“ just days before the French attacks, has clearly become the primary security concern for NATO countries. Florida Senator Marco Rubio is calling on the U.S. to invoke article 5 of the NATO charter, which states that an attack on one member country is an attack on all, followed by a U.S. Declaration of War against the Islamic State.

As the United States is already inarguably involved in a war with the Islamic State, it’s unclear what that would mean other than the idea that we would commit more resources, including increased special operations support and likely a large force of U.S. ground troops in both Iraq and Syria. Fighting a non-nation is not a simple task, as we learned with al-Qaeda.

It is often said that the U.S. military works very well as a broadsword but poorly as a scalpel. Trying to fight a force with surgical precision within a country you are not at war with is going to be messy and problematic because you are going to kill a lot of innocent civilians, while destroying most of the infrastructure they rely on to live. Cruz headed off such questions by making it clear that he believes we should immediately increase our tolerance for the death of civilian innocents, something that’s been echoed by many Republicans.

Many critics of the mainstream response have noted that neither the Obama administration, his Republican adversaries nor the mainstream media have been nearly as interested in the brutal decimation of a far greater number of people at the hands of the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram, suggesting that because the group’s violent slaughter of thousands of innocent Nigerians involved poor black people in Africa rather than a much more affluent, largely white population in Europe it was not made a priority. That’s a very fair point to make and reminds us that the "World’s Police Force“ moniker we often ascribe to ourselves is quite overblown.

In the end, we might do well to remember that we are likely in our current situation precisely because we responded to a series of unfortunate terrorist attacks here 14 years ago with sweeping aggression that lacked a coherent vision for success and a viable exit strategy, while going on to completely destabilize an entire region of the world and pave the way for the rise of the very group that we are now dealing with. More recently, our hamfisted and failed approach to backing regime change in Syria is, in large part, what created the situation that has led to millions of refugees fleeing a hopelessly war-torn country.