Disagreement Over Whether France Could Have Prevented #ParisAttacks

The blame game.

See Politico, "The blame game begins in France":

PARIS — French commentators and experts weighed in Sunday with critical assessments of the government’s handling of the fight against terror in recent months, focusing on shortcomings in its understanding of the threat leading up to Friday’s attacks.

While some argued that French authorities had underestimated the terrorist threat to France by failing to respond to it as an all-out war, others claimed the attacks may have been caused by the country’s get-tough policies at home and abroad.

“It was a war. A real war. We knew it, but in the end, we preferred to turn a blind eye,” wrote Alexis Brézet, managing editor of the right-leaning Figaro newspaper, in a column on the front page of a special edition on the terror attacks.

Vincent Desportes, a retired army general who headed one of France’s must prestigious military schools, said in an interview with L’Obs that the country was facing a war “which targets France, our values, our lifestyle, our liberties.”

He said, “Unfortunately, France did not want to recognize this state of war.”

Brézet, Desportes and other commentators focused on what they called numerous shortcomings in France’s handling of the anti-terror fight after the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in January.

Brézet referred to “numerous alerts,” but noted that several counter-terrorism measures had not been implemented, including surveillance of radical imams. He also decried the lack of surveillance of people who had traveled to Syria and returned to France, as well as the “short-sighted diplomacy” which “pretends — rightly so — to fight Daesh in Syria, but refuses stubbornly to support its main adversary, Russia, because it supports [Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad’s regime.”

Desportes called on France to rethink its priorities in the fight against terrorism and improve its military strategy.

“We will certainly need to withdraw from some external operations,” said Delportes. “We need to redeploy forces on French soil, and better use them on the ground.”As long as Western countries cling to political correctness, afraid to hurt the feelings of Muslims, then folks can forget about defeating Islamism. It's all of a package. You gotta go all in, or forget about it.