Vote as if your security depends on it
JUST WATCHED
Trump and Clinton disagree on battling terrorism
MUST WATCH
Trump and Clinton disagree on battling terrorism 02:40
Story highlights
- Stephen Flynn: Donald Trump poses a clear and present danger to the United States
- Electing Trump would undermine all the steps we have taken to create a safer and more secure union, writes Flynn
Stephen Flynn is a professor and co-director of the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security at Northeastern University. He is author of "America the Vulnerable" and "The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation." A retired Coast Guard officer, he has advised both the Bush and Obama administrations, including as the homeland security policy adviser for President Obama's 2008 transition team. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.
(CNN)There are three cardinal rules for homeland security, and Donald Trump has been breaking each one with abandon.
First, don't overstate the threat.
Doing so only indiscriminately elevates public anxiety. It also
creates the toxic conditions within our body politic that lead to costly
and harmful overreactions, which end up rewarding our adversaries for
engaging in acts of terror.
Stephen Flynn
Generating
widespread fear about a real, but limited danger serves no useful end.
Remember the color-coded warning system that was trotted out after
9/11? It was widely criticized, and for good reason. What were people
supposed to do when the US Department of Homeland Security declared
condition orange or condition red? The Obama administration quite
rightly abandoned it.
Playing up a
sense of pervasive and indiscriminate threat that leaves Americans
feeling helpless and has two dangerous outcomes. For the already
anxious, it fuels paranoia. For the skeptics, it provides fodder for
their apathy and denial.
Second, don't overstate what can be done about the threat. After 9/11, elected leaders and national security and homeland security officials would often say:
"Terrorists have to be right only once, while we have to be right 100%
of the time." The intent was to convey commitment toward doing whatever
it takes to prevent the next act of terrorism. But the outcome was to
create overinflated public expectations about what can and was being
done to make the homeland safe. In what human endeavor has government
ever been 100% successful? When the inevitable happens, and the nation
feels as though it has been misled, public trust ends up strewn among
the casualties.
Views on Election 2016
Paul Ryan: The choice facing America
Tim Naftali: Secrets first ladies always keep
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Eric Trump and family
Akhil Reed Amar: Impeach Hillary Clinton?
Two Princeton profs on your election anxiety
Ilene Prusher: How Trump judges women
Juliette Kayyem: Big threat on Election Day?
Ben Nimmo: How Russia is trying to rig it
Josh Douglas: What if the election is disputed?
Tim Naftali: Secrets first ladies always keep
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Eric Trump and family
Akhil Reed Amar: Impeach Hillary Clinton?
Two Princeton profs on your election anxiety
Ilene Prusher: How Trump judges women
Juliette Kayyem: Big threat on Election Day?
Ben Nimmo: How Russia is trying to rig it
Josh Douglas: What if the election is disputed?
Preventing
terrorism is hard, particularly when dealing with homegrown lone-wolf
attacks. This risk is being well-managed by law enforcement at all
levels, supported by recent homeland security programs
to combat violent extremism by providing resources to communities to
put in place local prevention efforts. To President Barack Obama's
credit, he has resisted the temptation to overpromise and has been
willing to take the political heat for doing so. Over the past eight
years, he has soberly declared
that acts of terror cannot always be prevented, while reminding
Americans that we are a strong and resilient people who no adversary can
defeat.
Third, don't alienate the people whose assistance is needed to deal with the threat. Law enforcement and security professionals are rarely successful on their own. The most effective policing
is community policing supported by neighborhood watches. Policing that
devolves into "us vs. them" ends up being dangerous for everyone
involved.
Being Muslim and American in the year of Donald Trump 03:01
Dealing
with the risk of jihadist extremism requires close collaboration with
American Muslim communities and the cooperation of intelligence and
security services in majority-Muslim countries. Confronting the risk
that terrorist groups may try to evade our border controls requires that
homeland security officials have good relations with our Canadian and
Mexican neighbors and with foreign officials at airports and seaports
overseas.
Beginning with the Bush
administration and accelerated under the Obama administration, a number
of cooperative programs have been put in place to provide strategic
depth by pushing our borders outward. These include the Proliferation Security Initiative and the Container Security Initiative
programs, in which US Customs agents work with their foreign
counterparts to inspect US-bound cargo before its heads our way. These
efforts depend on good global relations centered around shared goals and
common interests.
Trump wildly
exaggerates the threat posed to the United States by terrorism. He
matches his hyperbole with sophistry, promising to build "impenetrable"
border walls and to "defeat the ideology of radical Islamic terrorism"
that "I alone" can deliver. By demonizing Muslims generally and
immigrants specifically, Trump has been poisoning the well in ways that
compromise decadelong counterterrorism efforts to engage with these
communities.
Smart
security is always nuanced and, at times, counterintuitive, which is
why it trips up capable bad guys. Alternatively, tough security is
always simple, which makes it politically attractive, but always
ineffective for the adversaries we really need to worry about. And
security is never an end onto itself. When the Founding Fathers
outlined their intent "to form a more perfect Union," the only place
they used the word "secure" in the Constitution, is in the preamble: "to
secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
The
measure of a security solution is not whether it sounds good but
whether it works. In the face of the terrorist threat, Trump is only
serving up sugar pills that undermine the best homeland security efforts
of two Republican and Democratic administrations while also eroding the
very constitutional principles that presidents solemnly take an oath to
protect and defend. As such, he poses a clear and present danger to
the safety of the very homeland, whose protection he has placed at the
core of his presidential candidacy.
No comments:
Post a Comment