Masterminds

Now that French authorities have named a suspected chief planner of the Paris attacks—27-year-old Belgian ISIS veteran Abdelhamid Abaaoud—the press is building him up as if he’s 100 feet tall. Abaaoud isn’t just another opportunist butcher of innocent flesh, he’s a “mastermind,” concur the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, CBS News, Fox News, Time, NPR, the Guardian, NBC News, the Independent, and other outlets. Even POLITICO gets in on the act, though hedging it as the “alleged mastermind.”

It doesn’t diminish the horror of Paris slaughter in the least to note that there was nothing “masterful” about the operation that took place last Friday. Nor was any special genius on display at two failed operations from earlier this year, on a high-speed train and in a church, attributed to Abaaoud’s know-how. These two operations—providing shooters with firearms and pointing them in the direction of a group of unsuspecting civilians—took about as much imagination and skill as ordering a pizza. The Paris assault was more complex: Abaaoud allegedly dispatched three teams of attackers to six or seven locations to perform their killing chores. But no true mastermind would brag about the results. At or near the stadium, where upwards of 80,000 fans were watching a soccer match between Germany and France, the three suicide bombers detonated their charges and killed only one other person.

About two score victims were killed at restaurants by gunmen, and other 89 were killed at the sold-out Bataclan theater (1,500 capacity) by three shooters and their suicide bombs. It might take a cold heart to say this, but by one measure the Paris attack was a failed plan. Several hundred or maybe even 1,000 could have died if a real mastermind had been in charge. If we accept estimates that eight killers were responsible for the Paris attacks, they managed to kill fewer people, on average, than one unbalanced person did at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Nobody calls him a mastermind.