A journalist reports from Le Carillon, a Paris bar that was one site of the attacks on Friday.PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER VAN AGTMAEL / MAGNUM FOR THE NEW YORKER
“The threat level is at its maximum level, the highest ever. France is the principal target of an army of terrorists with unlimited means … and a desire, which they have expressed clearly and unceasingly, to strike us. What’s more, it must be said: against the scale of the threat, and the diversity of forms it can take, our anti-terrorist apparatus has become permeable, fallible, less efficient than ever…. The darkest days are ahead of us. The real war that ISIS intends to wage on our soil has not yet begun.”
That’s how Marc Trévidic told France’s fortune in an interview with Paris Match, in September, shortly after he stepped down from a ten-year stint as the Republic’s top anti-terrorism judge. Even if you’ve never read Paris Match, and had never heard of Trévidic, you may well have found that your shock and horror at the massacres visited on Paris last night were accompanied by a grim lack of surprise. If anything, for anyone who has paid even fitful attention to the news of the world in the past fifteen years, the surprise is that it has taken so long for such attacks to become as commonplace in the West as they are in so much of the rest of the world, in the course of the ever proliferating and metastasizing post-9/11 wars, which Pope Francis now describes as a “piecemeal World War Three.”
In January, the targets in Paris were atheist cartoonists and Jews, but last night the ISIS commandos left no doubt, as they slaughtered more than a hundred and twenty civilians, at cafés and a concert hall and a football stadium, that they are not so discriminating: we are all infidels deserving death. In taking credit for the attacks, ISIS celebrated the body count with characteristically grotesque comic-book supervillain rhetoric, describing the scene at the Stade de France as a “match between the Crusader German and French teams, where the fool of France, François Hollande, was present,” and the indie-rock concert at the Bataclan concert hall as “a profligate prostitution party” for “apostates.”
With the increasing familiarity of such attacks comes the increasing familiarity of the reaction: the state of emergency, the military in the streets, the closing of the borders, the call for harder, fiercer, more unrelenting retaliation. The self-inflicted wounds of America’s often disastrous reactions to the wound of 9/11 stand as a cautionary tale. But although ISIS itself arose from the rubble of America’s overreaction, there is no reason to expect that the caution will be heeded.
The war at Europe’s perimeter has been closing in for years now, and the refugee crisis has put its open-borders policy under nearly fatal pressure. This morning, travellers found themselves asked for the first time in this century to show their papers when they crossed French frontiers (and there were reports of spot-checking of passports in other Schengen countries, too). It is hard to foresee—even as we learn that the majority of yesterday’s attackers were of European nationality—how those border controls will be relaxed again anytime soon, especially with the right-wing Marine Le Pen already showing up as the next Presidential favorite in recent French polls. The fact that at least one of the dead killers in Paris was identified today as having entered Europe as a refugee from Syria will weigh heavily against the fate of millions of his compatriots, who are fleeing the terror he stood for.
Trévidic foresaw last night’s scenario—multiple, coördinated attacks against ordinary-seeming targets, “a cinema, a shopping mall, a popular gathering place”—with chilling accuracy in his interview with Paris Match. But more chilling still was his clear warning that there would be more and worse attacks to come. “Terrorism is one-upmanship,” he said. “It must always go further, hit harder.” So the aftermath of each big attack is the prelude to the next, quite likely more terrible one. “The politicians take a martial stance, but they have no long-term vision,” Trévedic said. ISIS agrees, of course, declaring in its so-called Statement on the Blessed Onslaught in Paris, “this is just the beginning.” Read alongside that statement, Trévedic’s forewarning sounds more ominous than ever: “Those who attack us want to do the most harm possible. And to do it in the long run. They’re preparing. The French are going to have to get used to not the threat of attacks but the reality of attacks, which are in my view unmistakably coming. One mustn’t cover one’s face. We are, from now on, in the eye of the cyclone. The worst is ahead of us.”
Read additional New Yorker coverage of the Paris attacks, byAlexandra Schwartz,Adam Gopnik,_Dexter Filkins, and__George Packer._
