With the recent horrible Paris terror attacks the question of Syrian refugees came up again. Today, in Antalya, Turkey, where he is attending the G20 Summit, President Obama defended his administration's decision to take-in Syrian refugees. He said that it was who we were, historically America has always taken-in refugees, and we were not about to change that. He stressed the fact that the Syrian refugees were fleeing from a terrible civil war, that they were orphans, women and children, etc. All of this is true, indeed the Syrian refugees are made up of desperate people fleeing a terrible situation, and there are Kurds among them, our only true allies in the wars in Middle East! But, as was feared by some, even before the Paris terror attacks, there are ISIS members among the fleeing masses. There may not be many, but there are definitely ISIS infiltrators as demonstrated by the Syrian passport found among the dead terrorists in Paris.
Some of the opponents of the policy to take Syrian refugees point to the fact that it is nigh impossible to do background checks on these refugees. How are we to conduct a background check in a war zone? But that isn't the only problem. Anyone who is familiar at all with intelligence work knows how difficult, if not impossible it is to determine the true identity of someone supposedly from an obscure village in the hinterlands of a country where the written system is completely different. It is something that we learned when dealing with Asian countries that use a different written system.
China is a perfect example. Chinese names could be transliterated into Roman alphabet a half a dozen ways. Someone with a name Li could be spelled Lee, Yi, Yee, Ii, or a combination of all! Even in Chinese characters, there are several different ways to write the name! How are you going to tell which is which? The computer will not tell you that the person claiming to be Li is actually Yi or Lee! With Arabic names it becomes even more difficult. Northeast Asian countries all have family registries and can be traced accurately, if they are telling the truth! Not so with Arabic names. Because of the very high rate of illiteracy, many births are not registered properly. We have seen even the very popular name Mohamed spelled various ways, Mouhamed, Mohammed, etc.
The idea that we could run successful background checks on all the refugees is laughable. We don't even do a very good job on our own citizens, how are we going to do it on refugees coming out of a war zone? Who is going to go into Syria and travel to all the villages and check on the backgrounds of these refugees? I suppose we could put all of them on the "box," i.e., put them through a polygraph test. But the polygraph is not completely reliable, although it is better than trying to run a background check in Syria! But no doubt there will be opposition to using the polygraph from some, claiming that we are violating the civil or constitutional rights of the refugees!
The situation in Syria is even a bigger disaster than in Afghanistan or Iraq. We and our allies are bombing ISIS and supporting "moderate rebels" and Kurds in a fight against Isis and Assad's troops. Russia and their allies, Iran and Hezbollah, are primarily bombing and fighting Assad's opposition, the very ones that we are supporting. Turkey, our only ally on the ground is primarily interested in fighting Kurds! What a fine mess!
In one of my earlier blogs I suggested, half in jest, that we could solve the refugee situation by agreeing to take all the Kurds, we owe them as much! The Kurds are the only ones that we can depend on both in Syria and Iraq. But of course if we did that, there would be an uproar from various quarters, it would be seen as being selective and unfair, same as taking in only Christians, as some suggested. So that leaves us no option but either to take in all and take our chances, or not take any.
The population of France is around 66 million of which anywhere (depending on the source) between 4.7 to 7.7 million are Muslim. So, essentially we are talking about roughly 10 percent of the population. In contrast, our Muslim population is only about 3 percent of the total population. So, we have a significantly smaller Muslim population in our country. Our intelligence reported that there are hundreds of known ISIS or Al Qaeda sympathizers in France, perhaps thousands in all of Europe, who have traveled to Syria, trained with ISIS, and returned to France and Europe. The numbers that could be identified in America are something like 40 and pales in comparison to France and the rest of Europe. But, how many of these ISIS sympathizers does it take to cause mayhem and commit murder? In Paris it took seven, seven terrorists to massacre 129 people and wound over a 100! So there are "only" about 40 identified ISIS sympathizers in America? How many men, women, and children do you think these 40 could massacre if seven did so much harm in Paris?
I am somewhat concerned with our seeming almost casual approach to the whole thing. If we know there are 40 known ISIS and Al Qaeda sympathizers who trained in Syria or Yemen, why are they still free? What is Homeland Security waiting for? I am also not too confident of our assessment of the whole situation and intelligence! When the Paris massacre first occurred, our experts said that it was no doubt Al Qaeda sponsored attack. All of our terrorist experts said that only Al Qaeda was capable of such a coordinated attack. Yet, the reports from Paris, almost immediately said that they believed it was ISIS. How could our "experts" have been so wrong? Are these the same people who advised Obama last year to say that ISIS was just a JV, and also advised him to say just two days prior to the Paris attack that ISIS was under control!
In his press conference today from Antalya, Turkey, Obama insisted that we were following the "right strategy." But it seems he was defending his policies against ISIS and the plan to take-in Syrian refugees more than anything else. He didn't say anything new or give listeners any hope that there will be a shift in our war against ISIS and Al Qaeda. He did take a swipe at Putin by saying that he was not about to flex muscles or do something just to gain political advantage and prestige. But unless it was done purposely to mislead our enemies, he gave no indication of anything new, instead, it was a very defensive dialogue. He kept saying that sending thousands of American ground troops was not the answer, that it would only solve the problem temporarily and we could get bogged down. That is true, but then, neither is the current "strategy" of pecking away with occasional special operations raids and air strikes. Perhaps there is a new "strategy" in the making that will work, who knows. In the meantime, America better brace itself for a terrorist attack in the near future. Perhaps it won't be on the scale of 9/11 or the recent Paris attack, but there will be one by either home grown terrorists, ISIS "wannabees," or one of those 40 that Homeland Security is "watching."
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