Peter Baker reviews Barack Obama’s anti-terror strategy in the New York Times magazine:
Perhaps the biggest change Obama has made is what one former adviser calls the “mood music” — choice of language, outreach to Muslims, rhetorical fidelity to the rule of law and a shift in
tone from the all-or-nothing days of the Bush administration. He is committed to taking aggressive actions to disrupt terrorist cells, aides said, but he also considers his speech in Cairo to the Islamic world in June central to his efforts to combat terrorism. “If you asked him what are the most important things he’s done to fight terrorism in his first year, he would put Cairo in the top three,” Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, told me.
The policies themselves, though, have not changed nearly as much as the political battles over closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay and trying Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in New York would suggest. “The administration came in determined to undo a lot of the policies of the prior administration,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the homeland-security committee, told me, “but in fact is finding that many of those policies were better-thought-out than they realized — or that doing away with them is a far more complex task.”
….Michael Hayden, the last C.I.A. director under Bush, was willing to say publicly what others would not. “There is a continuum from the Bush administration, particularly as it changed in the second administration as circumstances changed, and the Obama administration,” Hayden told me. James Jay Carafano, a homeland-security expert at the Heritage Foundation, was blunter. “I don’t think it’s even fair to call it Bush Lite,” he said. “It’s Bush. It’s really, really hard to find a difference that’s meaningful and not atmospheric. You see a lot of straining on things trying to make things look repackaged, but they’re really not that different.”
Most former Bush officials, Baker says, aren’t willing to admit this because they’re afraid of retaliation from the Cheney wing of the party. But it seems largely true to me. And even though I’d prefer a little more in the way of concrete changes, those “atmospherics” are probably more important than Carafano gives them credit for, since the fight against terrorism is very largely one of moderating the conditions that allow groups like al-Qaeda to recruit and function in the first place. Technically, it might not matter whether we keep terror suspects in Guantanamo or Illinois, but if closing Gitmo deprives Osama bin Laden of a rallying point for his troops then it’s worth a thousand drone attacks in the hinterlands of Afghanistan.
On another note, conservative moderates are a real bunch of cowards, aren’t they? Liberal moderates sure don’t have any problem pissing off the lefty wing of their party.
