There will always be another target

Juliette Kayyem,

on CNN: “What has been shown in Brussels and in Istanbul is that even if you fortify a target there will always be another soft target or soft area and that’s essentially what the terrorists are doing. They see a security apparatus built and then they just back up 10 feet and deploy in those areas that are more public … Certainly you could extend the security 10 miles away from an airport and guess what—the vulnerability will be at mile 10.1. And so at some stage we just have to accept a level of vulnerability given the threat that we have.”

Jayson Ahern,

on CNBC: “As you move the layers of security around, you have got to be careful about having areas where you are going to have significant numbers of people dwelling because that becomes a soft target, a target of opportunity when you're dealing with the type of adversaries that we're looking at today. One of the things we need to do better — because there’s certainly no lack of police force security personnel or military at many of the airports in the U.S. as well as around the world — (is) to make sure we’re doing more on the intelligence front. Get much more information about what some of these terrorist organizations are planning, adapt our strategy to that, and be much more proactive in dealing with some of these things ... It’s putting the right comprehensive plan in place.”

David Horovitz, Times of

Israel: “The current accelerating pace of international terrorism requires more than the now-standard, routine, unthinking procedures for securing airports and other places where people gather in large numbers … Complacently declaring, hours after a massacre at your airport, that there were no security failures — well, that’s just an invitation to the next group of killers. Unconscionably, it’s an invitation that’s also open at most airports around the world.”

Kori Schake, National

Review: “President Obama condemned (Istanbul) as a ‘heinous terrorist attack.’ He should also, perhaps, have accepted some responsibility for it, because the stately pace of his approach to defeating the Islamic State is feeding the wildfire burning throughout the Middle East and taking a grave toll on states allied to us — most especially on Turkey and Jordan.