Hearing the terrible news from Paris reaffirmed something Saxby Chambliss already knew about the terrorists of the Islamic State:
“When they say they’re going to do something, they need to be taken seriously,” he said, “because they don’t spread false rumors about that.”
Chambliss represented Georgia for 12 years in the U.S. Senate, the last four of them as vice chairman of the chamber’s intelligence committee, before leaving office in January. He has also served on an advisory board for the National Counterterrorism Center, one of the agencies tasked with vetting refugees seeking asylum in the United States, and in a phone interview this past week urged a “pause” in accepting people fleeing Syria.
“They’ve got to do an investigation of each and every one of those folks,” Chambliss said. “The problem that they have is that we have nobody on the ground in Syria. The embassy in Syria’s been closed for several years. Therefore, when it comes to vetting, we don’t know anything about these people … we’re having to rely in a lot of ways on what these refugees tell us themselves.”
That’d be a tall enough task, Chambliss said, if the U.S. were only to accept the 10,000 refugees the Obama administration has pledged to take. “But in reality,” he said, “it’s going to be close to 75,000. That would totally overwhelm the system. We can’t handle that many in any one year right now, with all the other folks coming in that we have to check on, too.”
Listening to Chambliss, one thing is clear: There is a real threat posed by the Islamic State, also sometimes called ISIL, as so many people come to the West from the territory it controls. It’s not that we should be afraid of widows and orphans — the most intellectually dishonest argument made in this debate — but rather that we have to be very careful about who walks in the door with them.
“The one thing we know is ISIL is going to do their dead-level best to include some of their members among these refugees,” Chambliss said, and not just because there are so many refugees at the moment.
“On Sept. 11 (2001), there were 2,000 members of al-Qaida,” he explained. “Today with ISIL, we don’t even know how many there are. Our best guess is something in the 35,000 to 40,000 range. Just their numbers give them more opportunity to take advantage of that situation, and you better believe they will.”
Ultimately, the answer includes defeating the Islamic State on the ground on Syria. That doesn’t necessarily mean, though, that Americans have to do all of the heavy lifting.
“The Arabs are ready,” Chambliss said. “The Jordanians, the Saudis, the UAE — they all have told us for months and months now that they are ready to join a coalition. It should be U.S.-led but not U.S.-dominated from a standpoint of numbers. …
“It’s unfortunate that we’ve let them get as big as they are now,” he continued. “That just means there are going to be greater numbers to take care of. It’s certainly in the interest of the Arab world to move now, because the longer you wait the more difficult it’s going to be.”
The more likely, too, we are to see the terrorists try to cow us with attacks on our shores. Chambliss said he expected them to try to make good on more recent threats on Washington and New York.
“They want to instill fear in people,” he observed. “And they’re doing a pretty good job of it.”
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