1. 2/08/2016, 4:12 PMNice attacks: Threshold lowered for Australia, says Greg Barton | Herald Sun
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Nice attacks: Threshold lowered for Australia, says Greg Barton
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THE scenes of carnage from Nice are as familiar as they are shocking. Terrorist attacks
used to be relatively rare events but in the age of the Islamic State they have become
almost regular events.
The problems of other people’s countries — of Syria and Iraq — have become our
problems too. The terrorists want our attention. They do outrageous things because
they rely upon provoking us into reacting in ways that suit their interests. Al-Qaeda’s
9/11 attacks achieved this in spades.

2. 2/08/2016, 4:12 PMNice attacks: Threshold lowered for Australia, says Greg Barton | Herald Sun
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Policemen walk on the site where a truck drove into a crowd watching a fireworks display in Nice. Picture:
Valery Hache/AFP
The lesson for us then is to stop and think — what they are trying to achieve, how they
achieve it, and how we should best respond? It will take time to get a complete picture
of exactly what happened in Nice on Thursday night but some things are already clear:
Confirming who is responsible will take time but all the signs point to IS. The
combination of a “soft target” of ordinary people enjoying the simple pleasure of a
night out with friends and family, or going about their business in a public place, and an
attacker prepared to throw away their life in a callous attack echo the circumstances of
Paris in November, Brussels in March and Istanbul last month.
Whoever was responsible, they were seeking maximum impact through maximum
lethality. We now know that one person in a truck can aim at a crowd and kill 84
people.
The use of an ordinary vehicle to “mow down” strangers in an open area is exactly
what IS has been calling for ever since their September 2014 call to attack “where you

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are with what you have”. And we know that IS/ISIS/AQI has been using trucks as
weapons with devastating effect in Iraq and Syria for more than a dozen years now.
The attack two weeks ago in central Baghdad that killed more than 300 in a bustling
shopping strip is a ghastly reminder of that.
Forensic police officers at the truck that plowed into the crowd in Nice. Picture: AP Photo/Claude Paris
This time, however, the heavy vehicle was itself the weapon. What was once an
abstract pensility has become a concrete reality. The demonstrated effect of a
successful attack is enormous so we can be sure that there will certainly be more truck
or bus attacks — no explosives needed.
The implications for Australia are immediate. It is, thank​fully, very difficult to obtain
assault rifles of the kind used in Dallas, Orlando or San Bernardino, but the weapon
used in Nice on Thursday is a fixture of our busy city streets.
France, and Western Europe in general, is facing a particularly high risk because of the
6000 or so locals who have gone to Syria-Iraq to join IS. In recent years the cities of
France alone have produced 2000 foreign terrorist fighters and as many as a third of

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them have returned to the neighbourhoods they grew up in.
Our level of challenge in Australia is nowhere near so great. And yet the workload for
our police and security agencies today is an order of magnitude greater now than it
was five years ago.
While we have not had the same flood of individuals returning from Syria and Iraq,
more than 700 have been stopped from leaving Australia and are now angry and
impatient to prove themselves and move from zero to hero.
What we can be sure of is that some of those will be looking at the footage from Nice
and concluding that they too could be heroes. The threshold has just been lowered.
Greg Barton is Professor of Global Islamic Politics at the Alfred Deakin Institute,
Deakin University