West of Eden: Brussels doubts

Syrian family in Istanbul. Photo by Jonny Hogg/Reuters (?) on Flickr.

Trump doubled down on his torture advocacy yesterday, naturally:

The billionaire businessman said authorities "should be able to do whatever they have to do" to gain information in an effort to thwart future attacks.

"Waterboarding would be fine. If they can expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding," Trump said on NBC's "Today" program, adding he believed torture could produce useful leads. "You have to get the information from these people."

That would almost be funny, if it wasn't so horrible, coming at the time it does. On Monday, as Belgian police were talking about the fantastic cooperation they were getting from Salah Abdeslam, without the benefit of torture ("worth his weight in gold," said his lawyer), they happened to mention one of the leads they'd acquired, the false name Soufiane Kayal being used by Najim Laachraoui, a suspect in November's Paris attacks; on Tuesday, the Brussels bombings took place, and today we are learning that that same Laachraoui is a member of the team that did yesterday's slaughter, probably the bomb-maker. The Belgian authorities might well have been able to capture Laachraoui and prevent the attack, thanks to their humane and effective interrogation practice,  if they had been a little luckier.

Or maybe they unintentionally tipped him off by leaking the name. It seems to me (I'm sure somebody who's actually well-informed has come with this idea by now, but I haven't seen it) to have been sort of the inverse of the TV-movie staple ticking-bomb set up, where it's the terrorists who were racing against time, advancing their suicide plot by several months, because they knew the jailed Abdeslam would be giving them up, their names and their safe addresses and so forth. Unhappily, they won the race, but waterboarding wouldn't have made the Belgian police any faster.

Meanwhile, Cruz and Trump both were anxious as well to take swipes at mayor Bill de Blasio for ending the NYPD's unconstitutional and ineffective program of massive spying on Muslim communities in New York City:

Cruz praised the city's police department's former program of conducting surveillance in Muslim neighborhoods, called for its reinstatement and said it could be a model for police departments nationwide.... Trump said the city had had "the finest surveillance of the whole radical Islam situation that there is." He joined Cruz in blaming the city's mayor, Bill de Blasio, for ending it.

"He took it down and he knocked it out and that was a terrible mistake," said Trump, adding, "We can be nice about it and we can be politically correct about it, but we're being fools, OK?"

No, actually, right now is when you're being fools. as police commissioner Bill Bratton, very pissed off, quickly clarified:

 “I’m tired of hearing it. Blaming de Blasio — I’m the police commissioner. I did away with the unit, informed the mayor I did away with the unit. Why? Because it was totally dysfunctional and not performing any useful function in the counterterrorism realm.”

I heard about that last bit (with audio) on WNYC's Brian Lehrer show this morning, along with a conversation with Michael Weiss of the Daily Beast, from which I learned some of the reasons why the US has not been subject to the kinds of horrific attacks we've seen in Paris, Brussels, Ankara, and Istanbul, and in general that young Arab-Americans are so much less likely (orders of magnitude less) to run off to Syria to fight for the Da'esh than young Arab-Europeans are, which may not be quite the reasons you'd expect.

The first one is certainly not one Trump or Cruz would be likely to come up with: it's the way Arab Muslim populations in the US are integrated into society as opposed to the ghettoized way they live in France and Belgium in particular (and I imagine in Turkey as well). If Trump and Cruz had their way, we'd be creating ghettos like those in Mollenbeek and St-Denis right here, in Michigan and New Jersey, under quasi-military occupation, with the authorities cultivating the kind of hatred we see in Europe. I'm so glad we have Bratton instead.

The other, which Weiss goes into in some detail in a Daily Beast article today, is just the lack of police resources in Belgium especially, which makes them unable to follow up all the leads they have. More on that crucial issue from Steve M yesterday.

In Dearborn or Detroit, Weiss was saying on the radio, when a kid gets enraged enough to try making contact with the ISIS organizations he learns about on the Internet, the first person he gets in touch with is overwhelmingly likely to be undercover FBI. I've often half-joked that as far as we civilians can tell, there wouldn't be any terrorist plots in America at all if it weren't for the FBI informants organizing them, but beyond the real worry of their use of entrapment techniques to turn innocent people into terrorists, it's a fact that the FBI really gets does avoid the kind of intrusive and illegal profiling and harassment and nastiness that characterized New York under mayor Bloomberg and commissioner Kelly. Whereas in Belgium they're totally swamped and can't begin to keep up.

Finally, Roger Cohen seems to be joining the Stupid Shit brigade big time:

Since the Paris attack, Obama has insisted that an anti-Islamic State coalition with European and other allies is getting the job done. More than 20 percent of the group’s territory has been recaptured. The president has suggested that more radical military action to crush the militants — essentially the deployment of infantry — would drag the United States into another Middle Eastern war and increase the appeal of the Islamic State. His argument has been: Defeating the Islamic State is militarily feasible, but then what?

This is a very high-risk policy — too high in my view. It allows the Islamic State to strut its pure evil in and from Raqqa. 

I always say Cohen understands the Middle East better than anybody else in the Times's opinion stable, but that's seriously wrong. (Perhaps it represents an Iranian bias, by which I don't mean he favors Iran but that he understands the Iranian range of views better than the Arab ones.)

Cohen's mistake is to see the carnage in Belgium and Turkey as evidence of Da'esh strength; but it is happening very specifically because of their weakness. As I wrote in early December, they have failed to create the caliphate of their dreams in Syria and Iraq, and

their identity as a state is really threatened; with the emphasis on activities outside their territory from Paris to Surt, they are reconfiguring themselves from an aspirational country, a Caliphate, into just another terrorist gang, and from a political problem to a police matter.

The reason they basically took over leadership from the Qa'eda back in 2013 was Qa'eda's failure to create a state, and now they are degenerating into the same condition they used to mock. It's really horrible for Turkey and Europe, but it is a sign that they have been defeated. And what is needed to combat it is not more military action in Syria but better policework in Europe.

Update: On the Brussels bombing as a symptom of the Islamic State's defeat, see Daniel Byman's op-ed in Wednesday's Times.