http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/08/15/donald-trump-extreme-vetting-editorials-debates/88775040/Candidate replaces un-American Muslim ban with unworkable ideological screening proposal.After weeks of unscripted asides and self-inflicted wounds, Donald Trump demonstrated Monday that he can read a foreign policy speech from a teleprompter — an address that landed some legitimate blows against the records of President Obama and former secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Their pre-announced military pullout from Iraq made that country less safe, Trump pointed out, creating a void that the Islamic State terrorist group rushed to fill. Their eagerness to invade Libya, and hesitance to intervene in Syria, arguably contributed to the turmoil in the Arab world.
Trump also amended some of the wackier suggestions he has made on the campaign trail. Rather than reiterating his view that NATO is obsolete, for example, now the Republican nominee wants to work with our treaty partners to fight terrorism. Good.
But when it came to the blanket ban on Muslims entering the United States, the proposal Trump made during his bid for the GOP nomination, the candidate replaced the un-American with the unworkable. Instead of a Muslim ban, Trump spoke of "extreme vetting" of "people who have hostile attitudes towards our country or its principles."
How, exactly, is that supposed to work? Would people with bad attitudes willingly confess those to immigration agents? Would the Trump administration develop special X-ray machines to see what intentions are inside people's heads? One wonders how many U.S. citizens would fail Trump's ideological screening test.
Trump said that "all actions" should be focused on the goal of halting the spread of radical Islam, that "any country which shares this goal will be our ally," and that the nation-building era would end — a simplistic view of a world in which there are multiple threats, plenty of bad actors who also oppose ISIL, and failed states that serve as breeding grounds for extremism.
And, once again, rather than keep the heat on his Democratic opponent, Trump turned the spotlight on himself: his supposed clairvoyance in opposing the war in Iraq (which actually occurred after the 2003 invasion began to sour) and his unheeded advice that the U.S. "keep the oil" in Iraq (which would not have been possible without the invasion). To Trump, that was just “another area where my judgment has been proven correct.”
As for bright new ideas for defeating ISIL, midway through his heavily footnoted speech Trump said he would call for an international conference on halting the spread of radical Islam. Near the end, he promised to create a national commission on the same subject. ISIL must be quaking.
