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Saturday, January 26, 2008
Is Homeland Security Too Focused on “Guns, Guards and Gates”?
Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
September 11 woke Americans up to the fact that some people hate us so blindly, based on so many warped and inaccurate views, they will try to hurt us no matter what we do. That is the lesson we forget at our peril. I agree that we need big-picture efforts like community involvement. But that alone won’t protect us from a terrorist driving a suitcase nuke into Manhattan. For that, we need guards, guns and gates - and a willingness to recognize that hundreds of millions of people hate America for reasons that we simply can’t back down on. Should we eliminate our insistence that Jews be allowed to remain in Israel just because that infuriates many Muslims?
Relationship-building is critical - but when do we wake up to the reality that we have already spent decades of effort on exactly that? For example, to avoid the perception that we are anti-Palestinian, we have done more for Palestinians than the very Muslim nations who criticize us over Israel. America opens its doors to Palestinian immigrants - yet Refugees International points out that nearby Muslim countries like Lebanon often refuse all entry to Palestinian refugees.
We’ve also spent billions of dollars in aid to Muslim nations, and continuing to do so is the right thing to do. But it’s also not enough. We need the security measures that make the ACLU mad, like watch lists and terrorist profiling. We can’t lessen security measures in the name of winning our enemies’ favor. As Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff put it, if we weaken watch lists, “would you then get on an airplane or put your children on an airplane in that kind of environment?”
Perhaps because we have put so much attention on other methods, our last line of defense is very demoralized. And that is not good for security. Border patrol agents, for example, literally put their lives on the line trying to protect us: this is when we need to be applauding them and giving them whatever they need to do their jobs.
As Andy pointed out, the London attacks were inspired by discontented local Muslims. Locals who had more “big picture” freedoms and rights than in their home countries. And that, as we all know, didn’t stop them.
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Commentary
By Andrea Cornell Sarvady
September 11th was a brutal reminder that there are people out there who have the desire and means to kill us in a mass attack, and we have to stop them. “The best defense is a good offense”, we like to say, but in this case it’s a little trickier than that. We need an offense mindful of long-term gains and a defense more nuanced than smash-mouth football.
“Guns, guards and gates,” our bulwark against external threats, remains an essential part of our defense. Yet consider this: attacks attempted or carried out in the UK involved insiders, young Brits willing to kill their fellow citizens. It’s hard to employ a simplistic “us vs. them” strategy, when “they” are living and working alongside us.
To better understand this quandry, I recently caught up with Juliette Kayyem, Undersecretary of Homeland Security for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and a former adviser with the National Commission on Terrorism. “We need to minimize the number of people interested in hurting us,” Kayyem says. A systematic strategy of “incredible community involvement” is key: “You build relationships with people so that they want to help us ferret out potential terrorists.” If we focus on fence-building around these communities, the non-terrorists inside them have no incentive to align themselves with our government. Why should they, if they’re treated like terrorists themselves?
Without an unlimited budget for our protection, we must spend wisely. Americans like programs that are easily quantifiable—this many boats patrolling the harbors, that many guards added to the border. Meanwhile, long-term detective work here and abroad can better stop a threat before it ever reaches our shores.
Al Qaeda plans to wage both economic and literal war on us; let’s not fall into their trap by spending millions on creating a police state on the level of North Korea. Even with an unlimited budget it wouldn’t make us as safe as one would hope, and, as Kayyem puts it, “we won’t be the nation we want to be.”
Simply building a moat around the castle is tempting, but we’re not living in a fairy tale. In waging a war against an ever present enemy, trust-building and infiltration is just as important as shows of might. We forget that at our peril.