If You Stand for Nothing, What Do You Fall For?

The Democrats could take Kevin Drum’s advice and get to the right of Ben Wittes, or they could not:

As readers of this site know, I do not hang out, intellectually or emotionally, in the human rights clubhouse. I defend non-criminal detention. I believe actively in robust surveillance authorities. I have no moral or legal qualms about military commissions. I don’t mind drone strikes. I’ll even—still—cop to harboring mixed feelings about coercive interrogations in the highest-stakes cases. #SorryNotSorry.

But turning our backs on refugees? Count me the heck out.

There is a critical moral line here; there is also an important strategic line…

Let’s start with the moral point: Unlike the many tough and controversial tactics the Bush and Obama administrations have used in combatting terrorism, what’s going on now involves action directed at concededly innocent people. Even the CIA’s interrogation program waterboarded people believed to be Al Qaeda’s senior operational leadership. The tens of thousands of people governors are pledging to keep out of their states are, by contrast, innocent victims of the very people we are fighting. Nobody contests this. Nobody argues that they are, in fact, an army of ISIS operatives. The concern, rather, is that some tiny percentage of them will be sleeper operatives infiltrated into a much larger group of people deserving of our protection.

I would make an analogy here to throwing out babies with bathwater, except that it would be in poor taste. We’re dealing with real babies, after all.

I’d go with “not.”