French President François Hollande’s reaction to the terrorist outrage that struck again at the heart of Paris has been to declare war — just as George W. Bush did in the face of “the mother of all terrorist attacks” that struck the heart of New York.

By doing this, the French president has chosen to ignore the many criticisms of the Bush administration’s choice, even though these expressed the prevailing opinion in France itself at that time. And he did so despite the fact that the disastrous balance sheet of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” well justified its critics. Sigmar Gabriel himself, the German vice-chancellor and head of the Social Democratic Party, brother party of the French Socialists, has declared that talk of war only plays into the hands of ISIS.

It may seem at first that the discourse of war is but an emotional release: a way of responding to the legitimate emotion aroused by a horrific attack that has already claimed 129 lives. Yet we should not lose sight of the fact that this is not a duel between ISIS and France, but rather an attack that — just like the 102 victims of the Ankara attack on October 10, or the 224 victims of the Russian aircraft that exploded above Sinai on October 31, or again the (so far) 43 victims of the attack perpetrated in the southern suburb of Beirut just one day before the Paris slaughter, to cite only the most recent events — is above all a fatal byproduct of the conflict that the world powers have allowed to degenerate in Syria.