There is a scene in the great television show “The West Wing” in which a group of high school students are stuck at the White House during a lockdown. While they wait, they talk with several members of the president’s staff, and the subject of terrorism comes up.
“What strikes you the most about terrorists?” one student asks.
“Its 100 percent failure rate,” Sam Seaborn, played by Rob Lowe, responds.
“Really?” the student says.
“Not only do terrorists always fail at what they’re after,” Seaborn says, “they pretty much always succeed at strengthening whatever they’re against.”
As I write this just days after the horror in Paris, I see a city in mourning, but one that is resilient in the face of death and fear, a city that will not bow down and be defeated by an enemy that hates us for reasons we sometime struggle to comprehend.
More than 120 people are dead. Hundreds more are injured. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility. World leaders are trying to figure out how to respond. The French military dropped more than 20 bombs on ISIS strongholds in Syria over the weekend in response.
But it was the people of Paris whose actions were heard loudest. Within a day of the attacks, the people of Paris were back on the streets, filling restaurants and shops, placing flowers at the attack sites, continuing to live their lives.
“You will not defeat us,” one survivor of the attack on the concert hall said.
In fact, they won’t. ISIS can set off bombs. They can fire guns into restaurants. They may kill and maim. But they will never destroy.
What needs to happen now, what needs to happen so 120-plus lives were not lost in vain, is that the leaders of the free world – I’m looking at you, Washington – need to band together and with an unbroken resolve vow to defeat ISIS with the same resolve it set out to defeat Germany and Japan in World War II.
It won’t be easy. For one thing, finding the enemy isn’t as easy as it was in WWII. We aren’t fighting a country with a capital we can seize. We are fighting an idea who believers, while concentrated perhaps in the Syria and Iraq, are scattered across the globe.
But make no mistake. They seek to destroy us, destroy our way of life. Make no mistake. We are at war.
It’s a good thing that we are entering a presidential election cycle. The next president will face this issue head on, and we need someone in the Oval Office who is up to the task. Pay attention. Don’t fall for the over-the-top rhetoric that may make you feel good momentarily. Listen instead for the candidate who has thought the issue through, who has a workable, long-range plan.
This is a moment in time that calls for bold, exacting leadership from all fronts in the Western world, who must be ready to do what is necessary to defeat an unrelenting enemy.
When an assassin tried, but failed, in 1984 to kill British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, she said: “Give in to the terrorist and you breed more terrorism. At home and abroad our message is the same. We will not bargain, nor compromise, nor bend the knee to terrorists.”
It is a lesson we must not forget.
