The Eternal City Made Mortal

Tonight's attack in Paris by apparently eight or so ISIS commandos in simultaneous attacks on six different locations within the French capitol killing up to 129 (89 at a music concert hall) with 352 wounded (99 in critical condition) leaves me feeling both sad and mad and of those on multiple levels. I feel so sad for the dead and wounded and their loved ones. I feel mad that vile filth walk the earth feeling entitled to take other people's lives and health and happiness without any valid justification and even exult in doing it. This event falls on the heels of the attempted train attack last summer which was thwarted by some off-duty American servicemen. Earlier in the year last winter, there was the Charlie Hebdo attack and now tonight's events have descended upon Paris.

I am sad and mad that my nation, sharing much collective guilt with a lot of other powerful and wealthy nations, did not prevent this from happening by way of stopping ISIS a couple of years ago when it would have been most feasible and before ISIS had killed so many tens of thousands of people in Syria and Iraq, many of them in such horrible ways as they have. The feckless non-leadership of the current President, who resides within his own mind in a lofty redoubt of moral and intellectual loftiness, has monumentally failed as a leader and as a man to fulfill his duties. This has resulted in harm to both the United States and to innocent peoples in the Levant. He once declared a phantasmal "line in the sand" in Syria which he failed to enforce all the while allowing both Republicans at home and V. Putin abroad to make a fool out of him by way of outmaneuvering his clumsy political and diplomatic machinations. Per usual, these machinations were ill-conceived and unfocused from the beginning until now. This resulted in no substantive measures being taken against ISIS. Subsequently, the President ordered the conduct of a tepid low-intensity war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq which was and continues to be strategically ineffectual. It was also easily one-upped by V. Putin when once he recently commenced air sorties by Russia's air force from within Syria. The current President also instituted an anemic program to train "good militants" to fight both the Syrian government and ISIS. The entire history of U.S. assistance to such fighters has been fraught with failure and mismanagement.

Of course, this is not to suggest the President of the United States is alone in being guilty of gross incompetence and inaction as it pertains to ISIS. Europe has dithered over what to do about this problem in typical contemporary European fashion. It might appear that the more decisively-minded genetic lines were killed off in the first two world wars. The Sunni Muslim community has failed to effectively fill the power gap left by the U.S. in this matter and instead provided material support to some of the worst elements in the conflict in hopes of defeating the Syrian government at any moral cost. The Shiite Muslim community has been guilty of supporting the Syrian regime while manipulating the internal politics of Iraq to favor Shiites disproportionately at the cost of undermining the legitimacy of the Iraqi government, especially as it pertains to Sunnis from whom Al Qaeda and ISIS derive and thrive thus adding fuel to the sectarian fires.

Surely this event will change France and the French and their way of looking at the world. It will also invariably contribute to the French reassesing how they see their own nation and the role of Muslims within it and that truly needs to happen. However, one wonders if it will also unleash an extremist Right-wing reaction and overcompensation to decades of French pussyfooting around with foolishly liberal immigration and welfare policies. These policies have caused France to become colonized by a people who to a great extent are not interested in becoming French so much as colonizing France in the image of the Old Country and its Old World culture. This won't work for modern French people who are proudly secular and liberal which is at odds with these extremist Muslim elements. These selfsame elements seem to find support enough within the Muslim immigrant society within France to operate with impunity within France. However, the blow-back may have already begun as I have read reports tonight of an immigrant encampment in Calais having caught fire and burned since the Paris attacks.