My opinion is that, all things considered, France's anti-terrorist policies were and are pretty smart - and most important, have always been under explicit rules and under the supervision of judges. There is due process, even if it has been made more favorable to the police.

There is also a lot of intelligence gathering.

I won't comment on France's Algerian policies because it's damn hard to know what's going on and I don't care enough and thus I really don't know enough.

My general position on the region is that we need to let all these countries get their Islamist governments in order to be vaccinated against them. They are seen as the only legitimate political opposition, so any election will brign them in, and the parallel experiences of Iran and Algeria show that preventing the rise of an Islamic government is ultimately more deadly to the local population (cf cival war in Algeria)and more dangerous to us (cf Algerian terrorism in France) - and that at least Iranians, if given a choice, would ditch fundamentalists now.

Further, we have to wean ourselves of oil - that will downgrade the importance of the region.

In the meantime, as stated by others, getting to a formal Israeli-Palestinian peace would solve a lot of things.

So there you go:

• democracy - including Islamist governments
  
• pushing for Near East peace
  
• dropping our oil&gas use

As to terrorism, we should ignore it - or give it no more attention than bank robberies or bus accidents.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes