Attack on civilians in New Orleans, latest episode in the West’s long war against terrorism

The New Year’s Day terrorist attack in New Orleans represents part of a larger and ongoing threat. Too many of our elites in the United States and Europe refuse to take it seriously.

Every terrorist attack comes as a surprise. Each of them is reported with great attention to the immediate disaster and without any serious attempt at context.

Unfortunately, this pattern of focusing solely on the present has marked American thought and policy in the 23 years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

It is painful to remember, but the United States also lost 4,419 young men and women without succeeding in transforming Iraq. We lost another 2,459 Americans who failed to liberate and modernize Afghanistan.

The number of terrorist attacks against other civilized nations around the world exceeds the current count.

The New Orleans attack, which killed 15 people and injured 35, was reminiscent of earlier truck attacks. Reuters put together a list of recent attacks and their costs to innocent lives.

• A 19-ton truck killed 86 people and injured 434 in Nice on July 14, 2016.
• The December 2016 attack on the Berlin Christmas market killed 11 people.
• The March 2017 attack in London claimed four lives and injured dozens of people.
• The August 2017 attack in Barcelona killed 13 people.
• The October 2017 attack in New York City killed eight people and injured dozens.

These are just some of the horrendous examples of radical Islamists using vehicles to kill people.

These attacks alone have killed 122 people. They represent a new face of the Islamist war against Western civilization.

The New Orleans attack is a shocking reminder that there are people in the world who hate our country and our values, and consider killing us a moral duty.

The great failure after the 9/11 attacks by 19 terrorists was the establishment’s refusal to take the radical Islamist threat seriously.

President George W. Bush initially responded to the impact of the attacks on New York City, the Pentagon and the failed attempt to attack the White House or the Capitol with the right language. In the 2002 State of the Union, President Bush described the threat and our response:

“States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, armed to threaten the peace of the world. By pursuing weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger… We will be deliberate; However, time is not on our side. I will not wait for events to happen while dangers accumulate. I will not stand by as danger draws ever closer. “The United States of America will not allow the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”

Unfortunately, elite timidity and moral equivalence bias pushed back and undermined Bush’s initially correct statement of the problem.

The American national security system had no idea how to wage a successful war against a transnational movement determined to kill us and end our civilization.

The American legal system had no answer to the dilemma of foreign mortal enemies who would seek refuge in laws intended to protect our citizens. Twenty-three years after September 11, 2001, we are still negotiating the treatment of those convicted of plotting the deaths of thousands of Americans. It seems that we have lost the will to defend ourselves.

Contrast this with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s insistence that German spies captured in the United States receive the death penalty as soon as possible. Six were executed and two received long prison sentences for having cooperated in the surrender of their accomplices.

The US military, the State Department and the intelligence services have no doctrine to persecute and destroy fanatical movements based on ideas. They have no doctrine to occupy countries and profoundly change their culture.

The United States and our allies must eradicate this global threat.