Paris

It sucks.

I am confident we can defeat the Islamic Fascists by destroying their safe havens. Some will scurry off to caves, some will try and live on social media, but these attacks happen with the Islamicists hold territory. Without territory, the Islamicists will lose momentum and eventually wither and die in the caves. I am not impressed with this attack. The news touts it as some type of amazing feat to hit three targets at once. Game of Thrones shoots episodes on three continents at once. If running around with guns and doing a few suicide attacks is the best these guys can muster, we are facing a weak opponent who should be not too difficult to crush if only we have the will.

9/11 happened when Al Queda was free to gather, train, and exchange ideas in Afghanistan. Now that ISIS controls major areas of territory in Iraq and Syria, it should come as no surprise they borrowed a page from Al Queda's playbook and launched an attack against the West.

And BTW, I don't know if it is confirmed these killers trained in Iraq and Syria, but I'd bet the house they did.

I'll say a couple of things that are not politically correct and somewhat inconsistent:

1. France should have stood with us in effort to remove Saddam Hussein. France opposing the coalition divided the Western civilized world, a divide the Islamicists and Russians have exploited to their advantage.

2. Nevertheless, I saw "we" when discussing the French because I am quite fond of the people and country even if they are highly mockable.

3. It is possible the wisest (and certainly cheapest in the medium term) strategy would've been to leave Saddam and Assad in power and passively support their regimes with the calculation that the devil you know is preferable to the devil you don't.

4. What the French and the Western Left in general failed to grasp post-9/11 was that Islamicists are an enemy that need to be defeated unconditionally. The Left considers Islamicists impossible to defeat, some sort of inevitable force in a part of the world they do not care to understand, and are deeply suspicious of actions that can be taken to defeat them. The Left views Islamicists as inconvenient and that the big enemy is still Capitalism, Republicans, Conservatives, whatever-you-fill-in-the-blank. This is a common mindset of losers and contributes to the deep divisions in the Western world about how to confront this menace.

5. We had the Iraq War won in 2011 despite it being much harder than originally promised. The wise move would've been to leave US military in Iraq and commit to keeping it stable as we did in Germany and Korea. Instead, Obama pulled out all the troops to fulfill a campaign promise because a large number of Americans were tired of the war and many rooted for its failure. I mistakenly supported this move because I got beaten down by the stories of "the longest running war in American history," and the idea that "we can't keep the troops there forever." Dumb logic.

6. I speculate this doesn't have to do with the refugee crisis, but if it does, I imagine European countries will no longer welcome anyone from Syria.