If we can't profile people, let's profile nations

We have to create—increasingly—two classes of traveler, those that get normal checks and those that are subject to intensive checks. Inevitably, this will open up fissures, but these are fissures we must learn to live with. As Melik Kaylan wrote recently, ” the world will likely undergo a period of de-integration or rather a new kind of integration in which mutually sympathetic cultures grow actively closer while others get slowly excluded.” Eventually, if the pressure is applied long enough, the innocent majority in the watch-list countries will decide that it is in their own interest to root out the radical Islamists. In any event, the list shrinks the umbra of anonymity in which jihadists conceal themselves. It is likely that certain countries will not get off the list for decades, which may mean that they don’t care enough, or are just too ramshackle and corrupt, to get their house in order. It may also mean that they are perennial enemies. Pertinent, here, is the one silver lining in the Abdulmutallab case: that the father reported his own son to the authorities. We have to encourage such people to go after their own fanatics…

To conclude, there are three under-acknowledged factors involved here, all of them cultural in character (and our culture inclines us to overlook them). First, when the White House and Congress are in Democratic hands, a slight and silent sense goes out over all the bureaucracy that national security is not all that important or interesting. Second: Bureaucracies reward inertia and do not punish ignorance. They are also—no news here—deeply compartmentalized. Three: Every educated American under the age of about 40 has been indoctrinated into the view that the worst thing imaginable is to be judgmental, because to make a judgment is, per se, to be intolerant.