Mistrusting Obama on ISIS—and Refugees The president’s refusal to admit a policy error in Syria stirs uneasiness about how he is handling the humanitarian crisis.By Jason L. Riley
http://www.wsj.com/articles/mistrusting-obama-on-isisand-refugees-1447803738
“So, this is another variation on the same question,” snapped Mr. Obama at one point. “And I guess—let me try it one last time.”
His additional explanation failed, of course, not because he’s a poor communicator but because he is attempting to push a political narrative so spectacularly at odds with recent events. Inside of a month, ISIS, which already controls territory in Iraq and Syria, has claimed responsibility for crashing a Russian jetliner, along with bombings in Beirut and now the massacre in Paris. ISIS is targeting police officers, soldiers, concertgoers and soccer spectators. U.S. allies are nervous and the American public is afraid, yet Mr. Obama insisted that “we have the right strategy and we’re going to see it through.”
That White House strategy involves resettling in the U.S. next year some 10,000 displaced Syrians to help alleviate the worst refugee crisis since World War II. More than half of the nation’s governors, citing security risks, are balking at this prospect. The Republican-controlled Congress will almost certainly try to stop resettlement, perhaps by blocking appropriations for it. And history suggests that it will be a very tough sell with the public. In a national poll taken by Fortune magazine in 1938, only about 5% of respondents wanted the U.S. to accept refugees fleeing European fascism; two-thirds agreed that “we should try to keep them out.”
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. has admitted 1.5 million refugees and immigrants from the Middle East. That includes 1,500 from Syria since the war began there in 2011. Michael Chertoff, who led the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, told me Monday that our vetting process works. Unlike European nations that face swarms of people showing up unscreened at the border and creating pressure to be admitted, the U.S. has the luxury of physical distance from the conflict, which allows it to be selective, he said. All potential Syrian refugees are vetted in person in the region they are fleeing, not on U.S. soil, and they are subjected to biometric and other background checks against security databases. The main complaint of critics is that the process is too slow. “We dealt with this issue when we had people coming from Iraq during the war, and it’s quite lengthy—like an 18 months-plus vetting process,” Mr. Chertoff said. “While nothing is perfect, it was a secure and reliable way of making sure you didn’t let in people who were trying to come under false pretenses.”
Mr. Chertoff argues that continuing to admit Syrian refugees makes sense strategically. “It allows us to truthfully say that we’re not hypocrites or bigoted against Muslims or people from other cultures,” he said. “That has a positive impact in terms of the disposition people around the world have toward the U.S. You don’t want to play into the narrative of the bad guy. That’s giving propaganda to the enemy.”
What most concerns the law-enforcement community is not a fake refugee but a long-term resident who later becomes radicalized. The Tsarnaev brothers, who perpetrated the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, arrived in the U.S. on tourist visas in 2002 at the ages of 15 and 8. Radicalization is an increasing problem, evidenced by the fact that stories about young Americans trying to sneak off to join jihad are no longer uncommon.
One reason the U.S. has largely avoided the type of turmoil that places like France have experienced with disaffected Muslim youth is our enduring model of assimilation. America’s focus on shared values and ideals over shared cultures tends to produce religious moderates. The war on terror, however, is clearly testing that paradigm.
To the public, the merits of Mr. Obama’s pro-refugee arguments matter less than the growing perception that ISIS is ascendant and has the ability to strike where and when it pleases. If the president wants Americans to help him do something about a worsening humanitarian crisis, he ought to show them that he’s doing something about Islamic State other than misleadingly insisting that the group has been “contained” and that his strategy has been effective.
So far, people are unpersuaded—and that includes a growing number of those in the media who typically do his bidding.
Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor, is the author of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).
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