The recent bloody attacks on civilians in Paris have yet again elicited widespread demands for an aggressive response. As after 9/11, fourteen years ago, we again hear that the self-described “Islamic State” (otherwise known in the English-speaking press as ISIS or ISIL) is fundamentally evil and deserving only the most implacable and savage response.

There can be no doubt that such attacks on unsuspecting and unarmed civilians are despicable, wrong, unfair, even, indeed, evil. But if labeling the perpetrators as evil excuses us from trying to understand them, then we harm ourselves.

Islamic fundamentalism, as exemplified by the Islamic State, is a response to centuries of Western (Christian) domination and exploitation of Islamic societies from North Africa to Southeast Asia. The leaders of such fundamentalist movements have found that they can effectively mobilize large numbers of faithful men and women to strike such blows against the “crusaders” of the West. Islamic fundamentalism is just the latest and most effective anti-imperialist strategy to have emerged from the Islamic world.

Terrorist attacks on soft targets like central Paris are nothing more than a tactic that is useful for groups that cannot directly confront conventional military opponents.

Terrorist attacks on soft targets like central Paris are nothing more than a tactic that is useful for groups that cannot directly confront conventional military opponents. Terror is a weapon of the weak. Hence the “War on Terror:” that we have been fighting since 2001 reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of our opponents.

The Islamic State and other radical Islamists don’t do terror because they are essentially evil terrorists, they do it because it’s about the only effective way they have to attack the West. If they could, they really would like to conquer Western societies and force their conversion to Islam. They want, in short, to relive the first centuries of Islamic history. There is absolutely no prospect that they will be able to accomplish that, but they can nonetheless just keep on attacking.

How can we best respond to this threat? Here are two contradictory truths. First, these radical Islamists neither understand nor respect conciliation or nonviolence. Second, any violent response will just feed the cycle of eye-for-eye retribution that is central to their understanding of the world.

What these two truths mean for us is that we have to respond violently to their violent provocations, and that our violence won’t really solve anything. A carefully coordinated, intense military attack might well succeed in wiping out the territorial base of the Islamic State (which is the first radical Islamist movement to even try to hold territory and set itself up as a state). But we know from prior experience with Al Qaeda that we can degrade or even destroy a particular organization, without touching the underlying conditions that produce radical Islamists. If we knock off the Islamic State, some other group will emerge.

We should certainly NOT allow ourselves to be drawn into another prolonged occupation in the Middle East. We can see from Afghanistan and Iraq that such occupations solve nothing, and indeed make our problems worse in the long run. I hope we can trust Barack Obama not to get drawn into this trap. I am fairly sure that all of the Democratic presidential candidates would also avoid it. Among the Republicans, only Rand Paul would not fall into the trap.

If we are ever to break out of this cycle, we will have to fundamentally change our approach to the Islamic world. We need to stop trying to control it. If Vladimir Putin thinks he can control it, let him try. He or his successors will come to regret it. What we must do is leave them alone. And that means not only leaving the oilfields alone. It means not trying to prevent beastly governments from abusing their own people. We are not the ones to fix such abuses. The abused people will eventually do it themselves.

In short, we have to respond with force to provocations, because that’s the only language our adversaries understand. We need to understand that our forceful response won’t solve anything. We need, fundamentally, in the long term, to leave them alone. Each of these three statements contradicts the others. That is our world.

John Peeler