It must be time to turn to diplomacy

Topic of the week: after the Nice atrocity

THE impact on the wider psyche of the French people of the Nice terrorist attack as they made their way home from the end of Bastille Day from hundreds of fireworks displays cannot be overestimated (After the carnage and bloodshed, the questions, News, July 17). I have more often than not over the past 20 years strolled away from the feu d’artifice that marks the end of the public July 14 celebrations.

July 14 has a place in the cycle of French life akin to our Ne’erday, or New Year’s Day. However, it is that and more as the infants are not tucked up in bed but are incorporated into the festivity, indeed inducted into an important aspect of French national identity.

The fireworks displays always start with three rockets – one red, one white and one blue – to signal liberté, egalité and fraternité. These are words that French children first learn at these events.

Like our own Ne’erday, July 14 is at one and the same time always the same and always different. As we grow older it evolves as our lives do. So intimately important is Ne’erday to us it is sometimes anticipated and depending where we are in our lives, possibly sometimes dreaded. So like Ne’erday for Scots, the July 14 celebrations for the French are a personal as well as a public event.

For this reason this attack will impact on every household in France in a profound way. For this reason in this asymmetric war we are now all caught up in it will register as a big victory for the perpetrators.

My sympathies and more are with the people of France at this moment.

Moreover, at some point, our leaders need to understand these wars we cannot win.

One person’s terrorist is another’s asymmetric warrior with access to 21st-century implements that have potentially deadly characteristics and that is not going to change.

Like the exhausted protagonists in the religiously fuelled theThirty Years War of 17th-century Europe, our leaders will eventually be forced to turn to diplomacy instead of the insane non-solutions of smart bombs and drones.

A form of diplomacy that delivered certainly not justice but a stability of sorts that the fools Tony Blair and George Bush and their acolytes so wilfully derided.