Mohamed Chebarro: Paris attacks: moving beyond the clash of civilizations/Dr. Majid Rafizadeh: Iran hardliners: ISIS bit the leg of its owners/Reuel Marc Gerecht: A France-U.S. Anti-Islamist Alliance

A France-U.S. Anti-Islamist Alliance
Reuel Marc Gerecht/The Wall Street Journal/.ovember 20/15

Even before the French-born Kouachi brothers went on a shooting rampage at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in January, French officials knew their luck was running out. Paris had always counted on its internal-security services—the finest counterterrorist force in the West—to keep the peace. However, the post-Arab Spring chaos and the American withdrawal from Iraq gave rise to Islamic State and reanimated al Qaeda, and this started overloading the capacity of France’s counterterrorist agencies. As a French internal-security official put it to me a month ago, “We just can’t surveil anyone else.”The massacres of Nov. 13 may well prove as momentous as 9/11. France is no longer a great power. Yet, fascinated by the might and freedoms of the U.S. and diffident about their own capacities, the French underestimate their influence. Frenchmen largely set the narrative for Western elites after the second Gulf War started going south. Remember the 9/11 Le Monde editorial—“Nous sommes tous Américains” (We are all Americans)—written by Jean-Marie Colombani. The guardian of France’s center-left establishment, Mr. Colombani juxtaposed sympathy for a wounded U.S. with criticism and schadenfreude. Washington hadn’t been sufficiently attentive to the enmity-producing exercise of its unchallenged, unbalanced power.He added that the American “hyper-power” had brought this evil upon itself by giving rise to Osama bin Laden by arming Muslim radicals against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Read liberal American critiques of post-9/11 America—including President Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech, with its apologies, cautions and irenic aspirations—and hear the echoes of French critiques. But imagine if Paris had joined the Americans in the invasion of Iraq; the now-dominant Western narrative of that conflict might have been very different. Because of the attacks Friday, the narrative will change. The soft-power-heavy, somewhat guilty Western analysis of Islamic militancy—where the progressive-minded avoid referring to Islam in describing an antipathy that sanctifies killing—is now dead in Europe and will soon be irretrievably embarrassing across the Atlantic.
President Obama’s inability to have an adult conversation about Islam’s manifest problems with modernity, which also tore Christianity apart, have kept the West’s loudest bully pulpit from provoking contentious and entirely appropriate debates among Muslims. The advancement in the Middle East of grand modern causes—the abolition of slavery, the slow march of women’s social and political rights, the expansion of education, the brutal tug of war between secularism and religion—has always been stirred by Western thought and actions. Having the French more vigorously in this game will help compensate for the politically correct, ahistoric timidity that has seized much of the intelligentsia in the U.S. and Britain. Trailblazers in analyzing modern Islamic fundamentalism, the French could well rescue the American left from its fixation on Islamophobia. They could provide encouragement and cover to American liberals to reflect and act without fear of being labeled Islamophobes (who are a dime a dozen on the American right and, as handmaidens of isolationism, don’t matter). The attacks will make the French prouder and more protective of Western civilization. Several Western military incursions into the Middle East may lie before us. If we are to sustain that fight against Islamic State and other radical Muslims who mean us harm, Westerners obviously need to know—to feel it in their cultural bones—why they are fighting. Such things are not a given, as anyone knows who has watched President Obama try to transform the Afghan conflict from a “war of necessity” to a “war of choice.”Washington always needs European allies to reinforce the moral purpose of sustained military action. The British are probably finished as a power of consequence. That leaves the French.
If they are committed to seeing this fight through to the end, the French make it more likely that the U.S. will commit more ground troops in Iraq and, as consequentially, put soldiers into Syria to create a defensible haven where civilians and the armed Sunni opposition can gather without fear of attack. Europe’s refugee and counterterrorist nightmares have no chance of resolution until the Syrian war is stopped. The French and Americans are currently in a perverse situation since they have de facto aligned their military actions with the Shiite Alawite regime of Bashar Assad against the Syrian Sunni population. As long as the Alawites and their Russian, Iranian, Iraqi and Lebanese allies are slaughtering Sunnis—and they are doing the lion’s share of the killing in the war and are driving the refugee crisis—Islamic State is unlikely to be defeated. And Islamic State’s propaganda, depicting France and America as allies of Shiite butchers, will continue to have real influence among Sunni Muslims in Europe. Both Paris and Washington know this, even if they want to pretend that a political solution is possible without militarily checkmating the Assad regime and its friends. If the French are willing to commit the Foreign Legion in Syria, an idea no longer unthinkable, it is much more likely that the Americans will consider ground troops and the arduous, dangerous, long-term effort to stabilize Syria. Although profoundly constrained by the size of its armed forces, France could serve, as Margaret Thatcher did for George H.W. Bush, as a back stiffener and force multiplier. Franco-American alliances have never been easy. But it wasn’t merely a desire to enjoy Paris that convinced the Americans to put the center of their European counterterrorist efforts in France after 9/11. However faltering, the French remain the backbone of Europe’s defense against Islamist terrorism, which makes them the front-line defense of the U.S. Nous sommes tous en guerre. We are all at war. The rest remains in Monsieur Colombani’s imagination.
**Mr. Gerecht, a former case officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Iran hardliners: ISIS bit the leg of its owners
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh/Al Arabiya/November 21/15
Tehran’s reaction to the Paris attacks has been intriguing and contradictory. President Hassan Rowhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif sent a message of condolence to French President Francois Hollande.“In the name of the Iranian people, who have themselves been victims of terrorism, I strongly condemn these crimes against humanity and offer my condolences to the grieving French people and government,” said Rowhani, who canceled what would have been the first Iranian presidential visit to Europe in 10 years. Tehran has used ISIS to consolidate its regional power. Before the rise of the group, Iran had a hard time legitimizing its role in Iraq and its support of Assad. However, what about the final decision-makers in Iran? Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has chosen to be silent, but his positions can often be determined by analyzing statements from powerful hardliner political figures, his close advisers, or conservative media.Keyhan newspaper, considered Khamenei’s mouthpiece, had a headline on its front page stating: “The rabid dog of the Islamic State bit leg of its owners.” Iranian police have prevented people from gathering in public to mourn those killed in Paris.
Using ISIS
The hardliners appear to be using the attacks to buttress their narrative about crises in the Middle East. Part of the narrative is that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was created by the West and regional countries to fight Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and the West needs to drop its opposition to him to defeat the group and avoid further attacks such as those in Paris. This suggests that Iranian leaders will not moderate their policies on Syria, Iraq, Yemen or Lebanon. As such, the Vienna talks on Syria will be fruitless. Iranian leaders have failed to comprehend that their support of Assad has directly contributed to further radicalizing and militarizing the Syrian conflict, leading to the emergence and empowerment of extremist groups. Tehran has used ISIS to consolidate its regional power. Before the rise of the group, Iran had a hard time legitimizing its role in Iraq and its support of Assad. Tehran can also use ISIS to strengthen its Shiite militias, which have played a crucial role in countries such as Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Iran might display some efforts in fighting ISIS, but it is in Tehran’s interest to maintain the group.

Paris attacks: moving beyond the clash of civilizations
Mohamed Chebarro/Al Arabiya/November 21/15

Who is calling for a clash of civilization in our world today? Is it the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria? No doubt about it. Or the Muslim Brotherhood? Some people certainly think so. Or is it Iran’s Islamic Revolution and its values, that border more on extreme nationalism than sectarian Shiite supremacist ideology?
Through Iran’s posturing and meddling in the affairs of states – ranging from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Bahrain, to name a few – one cannot exclude the undertones of a clash of civilizations made by its leadership. Some suggest that Jewish extremism is indirectly aligned to that clash, as it advances its ultimate goal – one that states that the modern state of Israel is best protected by Jewish state to stand up to a possibly ever-spreading ISIS. The latest attacks on Paris seem to serve one objective, and that is to raise tensions and intolerance. ISIS hopes to sow the seeds of fear and hatred in the open, civil societies spread out across Europe and the rest of the world for the past six or seven decades.
Seeds of fear
The latest attacks in Paris will no doubt awaken fears and embolden the extreme right, not just in France, but across the continent. For the ISIS-linked cells that committed this heinous crime against Parisians did not spare the Christians or the Muslims, the Buddhists or the atheists, women or men, or the young or the old. The attacks did not differentiate between lovers of music, whether of hard rock, heavy metal or jazz. The criminals were blind to other nationalities and did not care if they killed French citizens or with them people from 20 different nationalities. They did not select their targets according to creed, beliefs, sects or ethnicities. They vented their anger on our way of life, and they were out to kill our way of life that for some reason they do not like, because someone somewhere told them it was the source of all evil. The criminals – and I will not call them terrorists as they wish to be called – are playing a dangerous card.
A mosaic of society
The areas they targeted represent a basic mosaic of modern society: a cafe, an Asian restaurant, a concert hall, and a football ground. Above and beyond, those who terrorized by the indiscriminate violence and weaponry were aiming at something more cruel. In the ninth, tenth and eleven districts of Paris, people to a great extent are colorblind. Most are politically correct and serve somehow as an example of coexistence – if not a totally perfect one.In these parts of Paris, the French Africans live with the White Catholic French from Normandy, the French Arabs are neighbors with Chinese. Jews live beside Muslims, while the Christians thrive happily with the Buddhists.
Winning over terror
In those same neighborhoods, an entente cordiale exists, despite differences. In a way, the city’s left-wing bourgeois, bohemian population resembles the world’s hard-working people from all classes, who are accustomed to living together no matter what. It is no wonder that Paris receives millions of visitors each year, who come to sip coffee on its many terraces at the corners of many boulevards, and to feel illuminated by the history found on Parisian streets. Those visitors want to be inspired by living an everyday life in Paris and then maybe wherever they go back to later. In the areas targeted by ISIS, Cambodians made peace with the Vietnamese and Chinese, while Algerian immigrants made peace with their former colonial brethren, while the Jews returned in force and repopulated synagogues that Nazi Germany once emptied of worshippers. Today in Paris, despite the wounds and the gravity and scale of the attacks, it is time to demonstrate a further attachment to living that same way of life that cannot help but resemble that piano player who returns every day to Place de la Republique, intent on playing for remembrance and healing, and in his own way expressing what President Hollande said: that the French republic will win over terror.And I hope that the piano player will play away the dangers of an imposed clash of civilizations.