Not to be outdone in the political posturing, New Zealand's John Key proposes to "improve" security checkpoints at our regional airports, converting our peaceful domestic flying to an adversarial one of mutual suspicion.
The likely cost is in millions of dollars, but the PM, in the most blatant demonstration of disregard of citizens' sacrifice, has refused to spend $250,000 to repatriate the 36 bodies of Kiwis fallen in past wars.
Cynical politicians who know the price of everything and the value of nothing are willing to trade liberty for security. The trouble is we, the citizens, will get neither.
Reliable military experts point out that the air campaign conducted against Isis succeeds only in enhancing Isis as the casualties to civilians function as a recruitment tool. The focus needs to be on the potential local murderers and on the source of supply - the funding that makes Isis possible.
The Paris murderers were mainly home-grown, born and bred in France and Belgium. The perpetrators have in common a history of criminality and prison experience. This must point the way to future interdiction or prevention.
It's not aircraft or cruise missiles or drones that are needed but adequate policing and a corrections system with intelligence that discovers who is being radicalised before they become lethal weapons. And programmes to counter that radicalism.
Let's understand Isis. It is a murderous criminal organisation bathed in a regressive religious ideology that grew out of the disastrous US invasion and occupation of Iraq. It morphed out of the former officers of the Iraqi army, allied with the Sunnis marginalised by the US-installed Shiite government of Nouri al-Maliki.
Isis' funding comes principally from oil revenues. Oil-rich Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia, have been funding and exporting Wahhabi ultra-fundamentalist Sunni groups for decades. This is the devil's bargain the Saudi rulers have made with their ultra-religious minority to maintain their power at home.
Without any critical review and despite the fact that 15 of the 19 murderers of 9-11 were Saudi nationals, the status of Saudi "ally" remains unquestioned by the US. Without that funding, where would Isis' weaponry come from?
Isis is now said to have control over oil in Syria and northern Iraq, and the Russians have been targeting that supply. But oil is just brown gunk unless it can be taken somewhere and sold. Someone is buying that oil. It is probably a lot easier for an intelligence agency to pinpoint the route of that oil money supply than to do the hard slog of infiltration and interrogation that might intercept the next potential attack. It turns out that dependence on fossil fuels increasingly endangers the West in more ways than one. Those who promote clean energy to diminish global warming have a new reason to campaign, while those who deny climate change and extol fossil fuels indirectly support the terrorists.
