text: For President Obama and U.S. allies, the Paris attacks are almost certain to force a reassessment of the threat posed by the Islamic State group and may prompt a more aggressive strategy against it.
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  PETER BAKER
  and
  Eric Schmitt
  The New York Times
  WASHINGTON — When the Islamic State group stormed onto the scene in Syria and Iraq, it seemed focused on seizing territory in its own neighborhood. But in the past two weeks, the so-called soldiers of the caliphate appear to have demonstrated a chilling reach, with attacks in Lebanon and France, and a presumed attack on Russia.
  The seemingly synchronized assaults that turned Paris into a war zone late Friday came just days after a bombing targeted a Shiite district of Beirut controlled by Iran’s ally, Hezbollah, and a Russian passenger jet was downed over Egypt. The rapid succession of strikes, all claimed by the Islamic State group, suggested that the regional war has turned into a global one.
  For President Obama and U.S. allies, the attacks are almost certain to force a reassessment of the threat and may prompt a more aggressive strategy against the Islamic State group, also known variously as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh. Obama met with national-security aides Saturday before his departure for Antalya, Turkey, where he was to consult other world leaders in a Group of 20 summit meeting now sure to be dominated by discussion of the Paris attacks.
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  “ISIS is absolutely a threat beyond the region,” said Frances Fragos Townsend, the top White House counterterrorism adviser under President George W. Bush. “We must not continue to assume that ISIS is merely an away threat. It clearly has international ambitions beyond its self-proclaimed caliphate.”
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  Iran is fighting the Islamic State group, but is no ally of the United States. Russia says it also is fighting the Islamic State group, but mainly seems to be trying to bolster the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad, who Obama has said must step down.
  To the extent that the United States has viewed the terrorist group as a regional problem that can be contained, the debate will now be transformed. Obama may have to rethink the lines of alliances and the contours of the war he has been waging.
  “Truthfully, I can’t imagine how it doesn’t change their approach,” said Michael Leiter, who was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Bush and Obama. “When you give this kind of organization this much freedom of movement and go after it this incrementally, people shouldn’t be surprised by things like the aircraft bombing.”
  Matthew Olsen, another former director of the counterterrorism center, said the series of major attacks would compel the Obama administration to take additional steps. “All of this raises the stakes for the U.S. and increases pressure on the U.S. and the West to respond more aggressively,” he said.
  Escalating action against the Islamic State group carries its own risks. The Russian airliner that crashed on the Sinai Peninsula 23 minutes after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on Oct. 31 was attacked after Russia intervened in Syria.
  Although a final determination of the crash’s cause has not been issued by Egypt, most of the world has concluded it was most likely a bombing, and several countries, including Britain and Russia, have canceled flights to the resort area’s airport. In addition, the Egyptian branch of the Islamic State group has claimed responsibility. Western governments have said intelligence intercepts lend some credence to the claim.
  Growing conflict
  The Islamic State group has warned it would step up strikes against countries that have joined the U.S.-led coalition fighting the group in Iraq and Syria.
  “The operational tempo is increasing on both sides,” Olsen said. “We’re increasing our attacks in Syria and Iraq, and ISIS is increasing their attacks as well.”
  Rep. Adam Schiff of California, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the attacks should dispel any illusions about the nature of the Islamic State group. “It will add another sense of urgency to defeating (it),”, he said, adding: “That will be very hard to do without eliminating its sanctuary. If this doesn’t create in the world a fierce determination to rid ourselves of this scourge, I don’t know what will.”
  The Paris attacks also raise the question of whether to escalate U.S. and Western military operations in Syria and Iraq. Obama has authorized airstrikes and sent small teams of Special Operations forces acting as advisers to aid Iraqi military units, Syrian rebels and Kurdish fighters on the ground. But he has strongly resisted a more extensive involvement of U.S. ground troops to avoid repeating what he sees as the mistakes of the Iraq war.
  In Obama’s view, the United States made things worse after Sept. 11 by invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, stoking a wider anti-U.S. militant movement that ultimately led to the rise of the Islamic State group. While critics fault him for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq in 2011, leaving a vacuum, he has long believed that a greater involvement by the United States would only entangle it in another quagmire without successfully resolving the conflict.
  Townsend and others said that the administration had been too reluctant to acknowledge an “inconvenient truth”: The Islamic State group’s threat extends beyond the Middle East and could easily lead to a Paris-style attack in the United States.
  If there were doubts about that before, U.S. agencies on Saturday were busy trying to make sure that was not the case, scouring passenger manifests on U.S. airliners and searching surveillance resources for chatter about plots.
  Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry made it clear after the Paris attacks that the United States would stand firm against terrorism, whatever its source. In Vienna, where Kerry was negotiating for a settlement of the Syrian civil war that helped give rise to the Islamic State group, he said the Paris attacks would “stiffen our resolve” to fight back.
  “You’re going to see several things,” said Steven Simon, a former Middle East adviser to Obama. “Tighter border controls, more intensive surveillance in the U.S. and more outreach to local communities in the hope that extremists will be fingered by their friends and family. And a tightening of already intimate cooperation with European intelligence agencies.”
  Containment in doubt
  Juan Carlos Zarate, a former counterterrorism adviser to Bush, said the spreading threat would require action on multiple fronts. “In the wake of the Paris, Beirut and Sinai attacks, the U.S. government and allies may not realize that there may not be time to contain this threat — and instead need to be much more aggressive in disrupting terrorists’ hold on territory, resources and the minds of Muslim youth.”
  The Paris attacks, coming so soon after January’s deadly shootings at Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical newspaper, will force U.S. analysts to review their assumptions about the potential threat at home.
  While attacks in places such as Mumbai, India, have been highly coordinated, much attention in the United States has focused on the possibility of lone-wolf attackers inspired by, if not directed by, radicals overseas, as manifested by the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 or the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013.
  “The multiple coordinated attacks defy the lone-wolf narrative we had constructed,” said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary of homeland security under Obama. “The fact this could happen is remarkable, and not in a complimentary way. We can withstand random guys with low-level attacks and minimal consequences. This means the ‘war’ we thought we had put to rest has resurfaced.”
  Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown, said it was never an either-or choice between lone wolves and foreign attackers. “The emphasis on lone wolves was all part of the wishful thinking that ISIS was purely a local phenomenon that could be contained to Syria and Iraq,” Hoffman said.
  Indeed, the initial assumptions Friday were that the Paris attacks must be the work of al-Qaida, a group that traditionally has had wider reach and aspirations than the Islamic State group.
  In 2010, Hoffman recalled, Osama bin Laden called on al-Qaida franchises to stage Mumbai-style attacks in European cities, but his order fell on deaf ears because there was no group then capable of such an operation.
  Today, the Islamic State group seems to have filled that void.
  “They wanted to be considered a global terrorist organization,” said John Cohen, a Rutgers University professor who was a senior Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism and intelligence official until last year. If they staged the latest attacks, “they’ll have sent a loud message they are.”
  Material from The Seattle Times archive is included in this report.
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