France’s “Merciless” Response to ISIS is Anything But

After last week’s coordinated string of terrorist attacks in Paris that killed more than 100 and wounded more than 300, ISIS says France will remain on “the top of the list” of targets, that this is just “the first of the storm” against “the capital of prostitution and obscenity” and “the carrier of the banner of the Cross in Europe.”

France is promising a “merciless” response, but what we’ve seen so far has been anything but.

With American help, the French air force launched just a handful of air strikes against the ISIS “capital” Raqqa in eastern Syria.

Activists on the ground say there were no civilian casualties. That’s certainly good. It’s what distinguishes Western armies from terrorist armies and gangster regimes like Bashar al-Assad’s. Western armies do their imperfect best to minimize civilian casualties, whereas murdering civilians in places like restaurants, newspaper offices and concert venues is all ISIS does.

The problem with the French response isn’t that the air strikes apparently killed no civilians. They apparently didn’t kill any ISIS members either. 

“Anybody who attacks the Republic,” French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said, “the Republic will fight back. It is not they who will destroy the Republic. The Republic will destroy them.”

Not with a handful of mostly theatrical pin pricks.

Destroying ISIS will take a hell of a lot more effort than that.

ISIS, of course, can’t destroy the French Republic or any other Western nation no matter how much effort it exerts short of somehow acquiring nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. ISIS can’t even destroy all of Syria or Iraq—not that they haven’t given it their best shot so far.

But ISIS doesn’t need to destroy the French Republic or any other state to inflict an extraordinary amount of damage. Just look at what one guy— Seifeddine Rezgui—did in Tunisia five months ago.

He casually strolled up to a bunch of British tourists on the beach and murdered 38 of them with a Kalashnikov.

The police shot and killed him, of course, and dozens of local Tunisians tried to stop him and even volunteered as human shields, but the damage was already done. Tunisia’s tourist economy went the way of the dinosaurs.

You can book rooms at five-star resorts now for as little as 30 dollars, and the resorts are still mostly empty.

Tourism is one of Tunisia’s largest industries. At least it was before Rezgui had his way with the place.

Tunisia, though, is considerably more fragile than France. It will take a lot more than one man with a gun or a suicide vest to break the French tourism industry. France has been hit a couple of times this year already, and the recent attack was actually a series of coordinated attacks, but because they all took place at the same time, they look and feel like a single large one.

It was the same on 9/11 in the United States. Four separate airplanes were hijacked simultaneously. We had casualties in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. But the four attacks were basically a single event.  

Imagine how much more devastating it would have been if those four hijackings were spread out in time. Imagine if a commercial airliner had been crashed into a different city every week for a month. Or once a month for four months.

And imagine if ISIS decides to attack France that way in the future. Rather than targeting five or six civilian targets simultaneously, they could hit a new one every day for a week. Or a new one every week for a month.

That would cause some serious economic mayhem in France or anywhere else. ISIS might do to France what it did to Tunisia. I certainly don’t intend to give them any ideas by mentioning this in public, but figuring it out on their own is no more difficult than reinventing the wheel.

The current French approach—ramping up the air strikes by an iota or two—will have no effect on ISIS’ terrorist capabilities whatsoever.

Which is not to say that a stronger approach would necessarily do the job either. Not even a full-blown invasion followed by the total destruction of the “caliphate” in both Syria and Iraq would reduce the terrorist threat in France or anywhere else to zero.

But it could certainly make a difference.

The United States spent years fighting ISIS under its previous name in Iraq and suffered no casualties at home from the organization while doing so. ISIS—which was called Al Qaeda in Iraq back then—was far too busy trying to stay alive on its home turf. And it eventually lost in Iraq and existed basically nowhere until the Syrian civil war provided a “safe space” for it to regroup and rebuild.

You want to fight ISIS? Don’t permit it to have a safe space anywhere on this planet.