The silence has been broken. The word was ever uttered such. There is no turning back. François Hollande has violated a taboo but has also said what everyone knew: the fight against the ISIS is not an abstract against international terrorism.
Fernando Mires | Polis Mires
France has declared war on the ISIS, supranational Islamist organization which itself had already declared war on France and Europe.
The horrendous attacks committed in Paris again, were not acts of fans without control. Hollande said it well: they are part of a systematic plan of war, organized from outside and with multiple branches within Europe. He said war.
War: word that scares voters who scandalizes the right-thinking, scaring the editors of newspapers, they should not listen to children. But it is also the word that best matches the meaning of the events that are happening.
The Paris bombing 13-N will be the Pearl Harbor of the French. Soon it will be for all of Europe and even Angela Merkel still dares to pronounce the terrible word, you can no longer silence more.
Perhaps European governments that agreed to be part of the great international coalition against ISIS, imagined that it was only a symbolic political front. As always they believed that the US would conduct air strikes on some strategic positions and then limit them to send medicine and food. ISIS troops were already owners of most of Iraq and Syria, no one wanted to know. Much less they wanted to know that we (the West) are at war and we are losing that war.
But France is not an isolated country. France is the historical heart of modern Europe. Hollande's war of words involving all Europeans. Governments should review their positions on the declaration of war made bluntly by the French president. More still, we are already living, be a war undertaken by all the political West and its allies in the Islamic world.
No time to worry too much about the reasons for the war. If the fault was Bush or Bin Laden, Saddam or Assad, European colonialism of the 19th century or 20th century American imperialism, Obama or Putin, Adam or Eve, is not the most important thing in this moment. No one thinks too much about the causes of a fire when you're burning the house.
The war we are witnessing is, make no mistake, a world war. There is no reason to describe it otherwise. And in fact there are more countries involved that during World War II.
We are living, in fact, the first chapters of World War II. Pope Francisco, who is not exactly a warmonger, and named it.
The word war changes all the grammatical spectrum. For one thing, international partnerships should acquire a new character. Military alliances that remarcarlo- -there are not the same as political alliances. Steinmeier, German foreign minister, and spoke of re-consider relations with Assad and Putin. Probably thought Churchill and Stalin. The, so far the only melee against the ISIS, Kurdish armies should be considered allies of the West, like it or not the Turkish government. The same Iran. Califatos oil, Saudi Arabia above all, must undergo a surveillance system to monitor remittances to finance the ISIS. And if Hamas and Hezbollah have already distanced themselves from ISIS, they should be accepted as temporary allies.
Which has already reached a war it will not be like previous. It is a war where the enemy does not wear uniforms or is identifiable on sight. The intelligence apparatus and all digital modernity must be reactivated at its most intense. The airports will seem at times to prisons. At other times they seem hospitals. Grocery hotels with swimming pools and golf courses, will be converted into trenches. Daily life will become ever more restrictive. The paranoid minds flourish between the administrative authorities and in their zeal, absurdities commit excesses. As Joschka Fischer said, Europe enters the "normal" world.
The word war also changed other words. The fugitives fleeing the bombing of Iraq and Syria shall be appointed by the same-and treated-as what they are: war refugees. Or evacuees.
Only then they can be protected from the clutches of the neo-fascist erecting barbed wire and burned places of refuge.
The neo-fascism advocates the fragmentation of Europe and its nations should also be seen for what they are: agents targets extra-continental enemy. Europe will be forced to join more than ever before, whether herself either within their nations. In the framework determined by a world war is no place for ethnic secessionism.
No one is fooled; I must say with all his letters: The one that has begun will be a, long, and above all, like all wars, ruthless irregular warfare; very cruel. Today the enemy, like the Nazis of yesterday, a war if not total is not war. So you have to know from the outset. In reality we must face her though his face is horrible. The other alternative is madness.
I'm writing next to a radio on. I do not have time to write impeccable sentences. Perhaps in these moments, from a hotel in Berlin, I write as the person in which I will become unwillingly or unknowingly: a simple war correspondent.