A friend alerted me to this article by Maureen Dowd in NYT:

“After 9/11, the government was revamped and departments and czars were created to make sure we would never fall asleep at the switch again. But it keeps happening, with everything from ISIS to the Secret Service. The Secret Service these days is performing about as well as the Iraqi security forces have been against ISIS. On both fronts, the White House is saying that this time it will work better. But nothing has really changed.
In the movie, “In the Line of Fire,” John Malkovich’s ex-C.I.A. psychopath muses to Clint Eastwood’s Secret Service agent: “You have such a strange job. I can’t decide if it’s heroic or absurd.” Can we have more heroic and less absurd?”

(Read the article here.)

I’m not sure about ISIS, there is reason to believe that the US secret services knew very well about ISIS, but that the politicians and perhaps also the generals decided that wait-and-see was the best approach.
Action always appears to be more heroic than inaction.
Whether we need more heroism is the question.
I would say that we need more Dadaism.
Please join the movement “Christians, Muslims and Jews for Dada”.
Interfaith dialogue without structural belief in Dadaism is a dead-end street.