Sunday Reads: The Paris attacks and their consequences

Today it seems there is no sense in focusing on anything other than the Paris attacks, so our Sunday Reads will be dedicated solely to this topic.

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James Stavridis, a retired four-star U.S. Navy admiral and NATO supreme allied commander, explains why this is time for a large-scale NATO attack on ISIS:

The Islamic State is an apocalyptic organization overdue for eradication. It has beheaded and raped citizens from around the world; has killed civilians in spectacular and horrific ways; has enslaved young women and girls and sold them in open markets; and appears to have brought down a commercial aircraft full of tourists. Now it has killed Westerners execution-style in a city theater. There is a time for soft power and playing the long game in the Middle East, but there is also a time for the ruthless application of hard power. It is NATO’s responsibility to recognize our current moment qualifies as the latter.

Frank Bruni laments the instant exploitation of the tragedy in Paris:

Before we knew all that much about what had happened, before many Americans had even caught word of it, before the ones who were aware had moved past horror and numbness, Paris wasn’t just a massacre.

It was a megaphone to be used for whatever you yearned to shout.

Douglas Murray believes politicians should start admitting there is a connection between the Paris attacks and Islam:

We have spent 15 years pretending things about Islam, a complex religion with competing interpretations. It is true that most Muslims live their lives peacefully. But a sizeable portion (around 15 per cent and more in most surveys) follow a far more radical version. The remainder are sitting on a religion which is, in many of its current forms, a deeply unstable component. That has always been a problem for reformist Muslims. But the results of ongoing mass immigration to the West at the same time as a worldwide return to Islamic literalism means that this is now a problem for all of us. To stand even a chance of dealing with it, we are going to have to wake up to it and acknowledge it for what it is.

The Guardian’s Nick Cohen discusses the effects of the attacks on European liberalism:

Respectable Europeans may damn the nationalist parties that have risen up against mass immigration as “far right”. They may say that the popular fear that there are terrorists among the refugees fleeing Assad and Isis is absurd. But their criticisms have only infuriated their own citizens. People want physical security as much as they want economic security. Liberals, who denounce anyone who says as much as “neo-fascists” or “racists”, will insult the very compatriots they need to persuade and guarantee their own defeat.

Philip Gourevitch writes about the events in Paris as a prelude to what is yet to come:

If anything, for anyone who has paid even fitful attention to the news of the world in the past fifteen years, the surprise is that it has taken so long for such attacks to become as commonplace in the West as they are in so much of the rest of the world, in the course of the ever proliferating and metastasizing post-9/11 wars, which Pope Francis now describes as a “piecemeal World War Three.”

Anne Applebaum muses on the relation between the attacks and the refugee crisis:

Europe now needs to restore security, stability and confidence. France and its allies will have to show that it is possible both to maintain a tolerant society and to fight — fiercely, competently — against the institutionalized terrorism of the Islamic State. In the longer term, Europe needs a consistent military strategy designed not to control the Islamic State but to destroy it. In the short term, in order to preserve freedom of movement within its borders and to prevent a wave of far-right governments from taking power, Europe as a whole must reassert control over its outer borders, create refugee processing centers at entry points and patrol its coasts.

Jacob Heilbrunn stresses that Francois Hollande is now a wartime president:

Hollande’s forceful statement makes it clear that there will be no diminution in the battle against the Islamic State. Hollande has become a war president. If Britain wants to show that it is serious about engaging in the battle against the Islamic State, the House of Commons must overturn the ban against British aircraft taking part in the Syria conflict. This is a fight to the finish.