It's time for Obama to look at terrorism differently
By Jonah Goldberg
LATimes.com
The Democrats came into power believing that downplaying
and downgrading the war on terrorism was both right and politically smart. The
former is debatable, the latter unsupportable.
It is always dangerous to mistake your
ideological preferences for shrewd political strategy, but that is precisely
what President Obama and his advisors have done with the war on terror.
On the right, the prevailing critique of the president's approach to the war on
terror is that it is both deeply ideological and unserious. Obama remains
fixated on the idea of closing Guantanamo, even if it means keeping irredeemable
terrorists in U.S. prisons indefinitely. The administration initially banned the
use of the term "war on terror," preferring the ridiculous bureaucratese
"overseas contingency operations." Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano
favors "man-caused disasters" to describe 9/11-style terrorism. Atty. Gen. Eric
H. Holder Jr. has decided to send self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed and four others to a civilian trial in New York City, allegedly without
consulting anyone save his wife and brother.
Immediately after the Ft. Hood shootings and again after the foiled Christmas
Day attack by suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the president's initial
response was to look at the incidents through the now familiar ideological
prism. These were "isolated" attacks from individual "extremists."
Admirably, Obama was quick to correct the record about Abdulmutallab,
contradicting Napolitano's initial contention that "the system worked." Rather,
Obama admitted there was "systemic failure." Since then, the media have reported
that Abdulmutallab's arrest and interrogation were as flawed as the system that
let him on the plane. FBI agents interviewed the jihadist for 50 minutes,
according to the Associated Press, before he was read his Miranda rights and
lawyered up, and no one even bothered to consult with Obama's national security
team.
Meanwhile, pro-Obama pundits have been rolling out a revealing argument:
Terrorism happens; get over it. For instance, Time's Peter Beinart and
Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria argue that the American response to the Christmas Day
bomber was "hysterical" or "panicked." Both say that the threat from Al Qaeda is
overblown and distracts us from smart policies and more important priorities.
Whatever the merits of these arguments and Obama's responses, one thing is
becoming clear: They amount to awful politics. One of Scott Brown's biggest
applause lines in the Massachusetts special election last week to fill Ted
Kennedy's Senate seat was that "in dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars
should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them."
"People talk about the potency of the healthcare issue," Brown's political
strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom, told National Review, "but from our own internal
polling, the more potent issue here in Massachusetts was terrorism and the
treatment of enemy combatants."
Indeed, after years of debate over the tactic, a Rasmussen poll found that 58%
of Americans who responded favored waterboarding Abdulmutallab to get
intelligence.
Of course, if the Obama administration's reluctance to treat terrorists like
enemies is derived entirely from deep-seated ideological principle, then it
should stick to its guns. But couldn't some of the reluctance be a holdover from
the politics of the George W. Bush years? The Democrats came into power
believing that downplaying and downgrading the war on terror was both right and
politically smart. The former is debatable, the latter unsupportable.
Overseas, Obama doubled down in Afghanistan and has lobbed more Predator drones
at Al Qaeda than Bush did. His base didn't like it, but it was nonetheless both
right and politically shrewd.
The White House insists that it is not ideological but pragmatic, and yet it
clings to an ideological nostrum that hawkishness on terrorism is not only
atavistic but at odds with a progressive agenda at home.
The British empire destroyed Thuggee terrorism in India in the 1830s (the
Thuggees may have killed between 50,000 to 2 million people). But the war on
Thuggeeism hardly dominated British politics. Bill Clinton initiated
"extraordinary rendition" without any serious political blowback or distraction
(in part because it was largely kept secret). LBJ's Great Society and civil
rights victories coincided with escalation in Vietnam. And let us not forget
that domestic spending skyrocketed under Bush even as he prosecuted the war on
terror.
Question: Would Obama's domestic prospects look better or worse right now if
he'd correctly treated the Ft. Hood and Christmas Day attacks as terrorism from
the outset?
Purely partisan conservatives should hope that Obama continues to see the war on
terror through the same lens he's used for the last year. But it would be better
for America -- and Obama -- if he saw the light.
jgoldberg@latimescolumnists.com
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