Ted Cruz is the one candidate who can face down Washington -- and win

When Ted Cruz says “the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend,” he is saying we should resist in Syria a repetition of the Libya debacle, which begins with resisting the temptation — in Washington, the obsession — to presume that the Middle East teems with secular democrats. If that is simplistic, we could use a lot more simplicity.

National security is hard. I admire Senator Rubio, and I believe he was right to defend the NSA’s metadata collection, which can help us map terrorist cells and disrupt their plots while making no meaningful intrusion on the privacy of law-abiding Americans. I understand why, after seven years of the Obama administration, the public is suspicious that government will abuse its powers, and I’ve conceded that there is a weighty argument that indiscriminate bulk-data collection exceeds statutory (but not constitutional) limits. Still, I think it was a mistake for Congress to degrade the program in the USA Freedom Act. I wish Senator Cruz had not supported that legislation, but I expect that a President Cruz would be an effective advocate for counterterrorism surveillance efforts that (a) are concretely shown to enhance our security, and (b) are appropriately deferential to legitimate privacy concerns.

In any event, the erosion of a surveillance tool needs to be put in perspective. It is a relatively small problem compared with the promotion of illegal immigration: the undermining of the rule of law and the integrity of border enforcement for the dubious purpose of creating rights for alien lawbreakers. It is a relatively small problem compared with regarding Islamists as potential allies when they share the jihadist goal of implementing sharia — including the Islamist regime in Turkey which, when not championing Hamas and Hezbollah and providing a jihadist gateway to Syria, exhorts Muslim immigrants to resist assimilation in the West. At a time when Europe’s peril illustrates the danger of giving jihadists the advantage of unassimilated Islamic enclaves in which to meld, these are the policy errors that most demand our attention. Wednesday’s killing spree in San Bernardino is a painful reminder that jihad is not some faraway threat; it is here.