David French:
It’s hard to see through the thick fog of reckless tweeting and nonstop media outrage, but the good news is out there. The Trump administration is already making several fundamental, positive changes in the war against jihadists, of which its revised travel ban is arguably the least important. Consider these news items:
American forces have launched 40 strikes in the last week against al-Qaeda forces in Yemen. Under the Obama administration, our operational peak in Yemen was 41 strikes in an entire year.
Yesterday, Iraqi forces recaptured a key bridge in Mosul, as they continue to advance deeper into the last remaining ISIS-held areas. This progress comes on the heels of long-awaited and long-overdue changes in the rules of engagement governing American forces in Iraq, which placed American troops closer to the action and streamlined requests for American firepower.
At the same time, after Trump scrapped the Obama administration’s go-slow approach to taking Raqqa, ISIS’s de facto capital in Syria, the Pentagon appears set to recommend a plan that will call for significant American military participation, including special forces, artillery, and attack helicopters.
Finally, the revised travel ban is intelligently targeted, excludes our ally Iraq, and preserves the reasonable virtues of the first ban while eliminating the confusion that led to its arbitrary, cruel, and obviously incompetent implementation. In the wake of news that up to 300 refugees are reportedly under investigation for terror ties, it’s prudent to pause refugee entry for a few months to review our vetting processes. There is no reason for the Trump administration to simply trust that the Obama administration struck the right balance between security and compassion.
To understand the collective importance of these measures, it’s vital to understand the basics of how the terror threat actually manifests itself. All the recent talk of “lone wolves” in many ways exaggerates the threat of the individual while minimizing the importance of terrorist organizations.
There are a few terrorists who are truly self-radicalizing, but dig deeper into any given terror attack and the chances are you’ll find not just warning signs in the form of obvious inspiration from ISIS or other terror attacks, but also actual communication with terrorists abroad. In a brilliant piece of reporting last month, the New York Times’s Rukmini Callimachus detailed ISIS’s direction and enabling of terror attacks abroad from Syria, including attempted attacks on the United States.
In other words, while there might be some tiny number of terrorists who need no inspiration for terror beyond their own readings of the Koran and the Hadith (along with deep rage or a sense of grievance springing from contemporary events), for terrorism to be a significant threat, it needs not just a willing or potentially willing population but also a concrete source of inspiration and direction.
The Trump administration’s strategy attacks the threat from both ends — limiting (for now) the growth of the potentially willing population through immigration restrictions and more-careful vetting while more aggressively attacking and destroying the source of inspiration and direction.
And no interference by liberal actvists judges and the 9th Circus Court