Obama’s Terror Sangfroid The threat isn’t ‘existential,’ unless you’re at Starbucks.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-terror-sangfroid-1452817051
President Obama took pains in his State of the Union speech Tuesday to warn Americans not to exaggerate the threat from terrorists. “As we focus on destroying ISIL,” he said, using an alternative acronym for Islamic State (ISIS), “over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands.”
On Monday ISIS murdered 51 people in suicide attacks in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. On Tuesday an ISIS suicide bomber in Istanbul killed 10 German and one Peruvian tourists. On Thursday two people were killed and 23 injured by an ISIS suicide bomber near a Starbucks coffee shop in Jakarta.
This bloody spate follows last month’s murder of 14 office workers in San Bernardino by an ISIS husband-and-wife team, November’s Paris massacre by ISIS of 130 people, the killing a day earlier of some 43 people in Beirut, and October’s downing by ISIS of a Russian jetliner over Egypt, in which 224 civilians perished. Last June’s attack at a Tunisian beach resort, in which 38 mainly British tourists were murdered, is already beginning to feel like a distant memory.
It isn’t clear what Mr. Obama means by “World War III,” but mass-casualty attacks against Western targets on four continents in the space of a few months probably sounds global to the victims. The terrorist threat hasn’t seemed so wide and so grave since the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. Counter-terrorist experts are warning that even November’s massacre was only a “dress-rehearsal” for the main event.
“We are moving towards a European 9/11,” one French official recently told AFP. “Simultaneous attacks on the same day in several countries, several places. A very coordinated thing. We know they are working on this.”
It would be foolish to rule out a similar attack in the U.S., which makes Mr. Obama’s terror sangfroid wrong-headed and politically misjudged. This is the same President whose every pronouncement on terrorism in recent years has been embarrassed by subsequent events, from ISIS as the “jayvee team” to Yemen as a model for counterterrorism to the war in Iraq is over.
The President sometimes qualifies his assurances by insisting that ISIS poses no “existential” threat to the U.S. If he defines this as a global nuclear war, he’s right. But ISIS would settle for WMD of any kind—from the chemical weapons Bashar Assad hasn’t given up to something from Kim Jong Un’s nuclear arsenal. The threat was certainly existential to the Canadian citizen who perished Thursday in Jakarta, simply for being near a Starbucks, or Nohemi Gonzalez, the 23-year-old CalState student gunned down in Paris during her semester abroad.
Getting your morning caffeine fix at Starbucks, or taking a beach holiday, or sitting in a Paris cafe, or visiting historic tourist attractions in Istanbul are hallmarks of normal life in Western societies. If “existential” also means our way of life and expectations for it, then by any measure the ISIS threat is existential.
Mr. Obama seems to think the best way for Americans to deal with this threat is to adjust our fears and change our expectations. What Americans want from their next President is someone who will give them fewer reasons to fear being murdered while getting coffee.
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