The bodies produced by the latest calculated act of mass murder against defenseless civilians haven't yet fully gone cold, but French President François Hollande -- still reeling from revelations this week that the government was spending 10,000 euros a month to maintain his hair -- has already announced that he will intensify his country's military involvement against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, even though the group has not yet claimed credit for the attack.
According to Le Monde, Mr. Hollande will add 10,000 soldiers and officers to Operation Sentinelle, which was activated in the wake of last year's terror attack in Paris.
Exactly two months ago, The Guardian published an article wondering if thousands of troops on French streets was another Maginot Line, a series of barriers built to prevent an invasion by the Germans through the border, but which was bypassed by Hitler's forces who crossed through the Belgian border, where there was no defense formation.
As one general pointed out to The Guardian, the presence of soldiers in key sites has not prevented any of these attacks, as the terrorists will simply move on to the next soft target. As the Islamic State loses territory and changes its tactics from conventional military warfare to pure terrorism, the number of attacks on French civilians will only increase, even if the overall lethality decreases.
The thousands and thousands of hours which have been spent patrolling the streets in futility could have been spent training individuals on counter-terrorism and in seeking out individuals liable to radicalization. However, there's little profit in securing the border and preventing vulnerable individuals from being radicalized against the state.
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| Soon needed on every street corner. French Defense Ministry. |
Today, predictably, there won't be much criticism of Mr. Hollande or his failed Operation Sentinelle; instead grief will rally the masses behind him and his 120,000 euro a year receding hairline.
Instead of demoting a man who should be concentrating on shaving his head and confronting the threats which promise to rip his country apart, the French people and a grieving world will instead applaud as a would-be tyrant gives himself more powers and continues in a fruitless endeavor to turn France into a full-blown police and surveillance state engaged in an endless war of attrition against an all-pervasive enemy.
