Remember the old Western saw, “paleface speak with forked tongue?” That’s what I think of when Obama speaks…. on just about anything. He says one thing and does another. Today’s NRO editorial pretty well sets out his performance on security issues. It’s worth the read.
President Obama wants you to know that nothing is ever his fault.
He gave a speech on national-security matters Thursday the gist of which was: George W. Bush left me a mess, and I’m doing the best I can to clean it up. A more forthright theme would have been: Radical Islam has thrust the United States into a defensive war, and it’s now my duty to protect the nation — despite legal complications created by left-wing lawyers, many of whom are now working in my administration.
President Obama described Bush’s counterterrorism program as an “ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable — a framework that failed to trust in our institutions, and that failed to use our values as a compass.” But here Obama must contend with himself as much as with Bush: His own Justice Department has argued, as the Bush Justice Department argued, that the nation is at war, that the laws of war therefore apply, and consequently that enemy combatants may be captured and detained without trial until the conclusion of hostilities.
In point of fact, the Bush administration’s counterterrorism campaign was anything but ad hoc. It was extraordinarily effective, and it is entirely sustainable — which President Obama has shown by sustaining its major elements. Detention of enemy combatants has been a staple of every war the United States has fought, which is why the Supreme Court reaffirmed the practice in the 2004 Hamdi case, even though the combatant at issue was an American citizen. The practice of trying combatants before military commissions traces back to General Washington’s precedent in the Revolutionary War; and though today’s tribunals were originally authorized by the commander-in-chief, as they traditionally have been, their use was reauthorized by Congress in 2006, without material change, in response to a lawless Supreme Court decision that twisted both statutes and the Geneva Conventions beyond recognition.
Bush’s counterterrorism work can be regarded as ineffective only from the standpoint of the ACLU, whose metric is the quantum of due process accorded to terrorists who recognize no law or treaty. From a sensible point of view, the measure of success is the incidence of terrorist attacks — and we have not had one in eight years. By adopting a war-fighting paradigm the paradigm on which President Obama must rely, lest his assassinations in Pakistan be deemed a violation of international law, President Bush expanded geometrically our intelligence on the enemy, decimated and dislocated the top tiers of al-Qaeda’s hierarchy, and killed and captured thousands of jihadists. At the same time, enforcing laws enacted in 1996 to enable the government to disrupt terrorist cells before their plots could come to fruition, the Bush Justice Department assembled an impressive string of convictions for terrorist conspiracy and financing.
via The Buck Stops Elsewhere by The Editors on National Review Online.