Attack a call for vigilance, action
The Islamic State group took credit for murdering and wounding dozens in Brussels on Tuesday in bombings of the airport and a subway station. Now the world mourns with Belgium and prays for its victims, as it did last year for Paris, San Bernardino and all who perished in the downing of the Russian airliner.
What Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel called “this black moment” for his country realized its fears and will fuel still more in Europe’s other capitals and the United States. It was a clear assault on the European Union, which is headquartered near one site of the carnage, as well as on NATO.
The latest attack also is a call for more vigilance and coordinated action against an enemy known for its boundless cruelty within Iraq and Syria, including what Secretary of State John Kerry aptly declared last week to be genocide against Christians and other religious minorities. “Its entire worldview is based on eliminating those who do not subscribe to its perverse ideology,” Kerry said then.
The Brussels assault underscored that the Islamic State group also is increasingly intent on exporting its mayhem on the misguided assumption that slaughtering innocents abroad is the means to its twisted endgame.
That creates an obligation for the United States. As Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, put it in a Tuesday statement: “It is our duty to develop a real strategy to confront and defeat this threat, utilizing all constitutional intelligence tools, so that we can protect Kansans and Americans and others around the world.”
That will challenge our ability to balance privacy and security, and will necessitate leadership in Washington, D.C., that is more serious and purposeful than we’ve seen lately.
Whatever this is that made Brussels a battlefield Tuesday – a war against a non-state or ideology, a global police action or something else – the U.S. and its partners are in it for the long, hard haul.
This story was originally published March 22, 2016 at 7:08 PM with the headline "Attack a call for vigilance, action."