Vindicating Bush

Charles Krauthammer argues today that President Obama, by his actions is vindicating the Bush approach to fighting the war on terror.

Sure his rhetoric is different as Obama can say 6000 words patting himself about how he is going to differentiate himself from the previous administration and how he has so much more respect for the Constitution than the Bush people did. He makes minor changes in the military tribunals that he once criticized and claims that now they're perfectly fine. He tells us that he isn't there to criticize those who disagree with him on these tough issues and then tells us over and over how terrible the Bush approach was and how he has too much respect for the Constitution to continue them, but then he can't give us any specifics about what he is going to do differently to close down Gitmo and still deal with those terrorists that no other country wants and who are too dangerous to release, yet for whom we don't have the evidence to try in courts. No shock, Shylock. Those are tough cases. If you're not going to hold them at Guantanamo and no one wants them here in our prisons, especially if you can't have a trial for them, what are you going to do.

Instead of paying attention to his rhetoric, look at his actions. And, as Krauthammer writes, Obama's actions, with a few cosmetic changes and different rhetorical flourishes, are following the Bush template that Obama professes to so disdain.

Observers of all political stripes are stunned by how much of the Bush national security agenda is being adopted by this new Democratic government. Victor Davis Hanson (National Review) offers a partial list: "The Patriot Act, wiretaps, e-mail intercepts, military tribunals, Predator drone attacks, Iraq (i.e., slowing the withdrawal), Afghanistan (i.e., the surge) -- and now Guantanamo."

Jack Goldsmith (The New Republic) adds: rendition -- turning over terrorists seized abroad to foreign countries; state secrets -- claiming them in court to quash legal proceedings on rendition and other erstwhile barbarisms; and the denial of habeas corpus -- to detainees in Afghanistan's Bagram prison, indistinguishable logically and morally from Guantanamo.

Liberals who supported Obama because they thought he would be such a break from the Bush policies they so hated must be suffering massive cognitive dissonance. However, it is not so surprising that the President, now that he has the responsibility for the safety of Americans, would come to see the sense in such policies.

What does it all mean? Democratic hypocrisy and demagoguery? Sure, but in Washington, opportunism and cynicism are hardly news.

There is something much larger at play -- an undeniable, irresistible national interest that, in the end, beyond the cheap politics, asserts itself. The urgencies and necessities of the actual post-9/11 world, as opposed to the fanciful world of the opposition politician, present a rather narrow range of acceptable alternatives.

Among them: reviving the tradition of military tribunals, used historically by George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Winfield Scott, Abraham Lincoln, Arthur MacArthur and Franklin Roosevelt. And inventing Guantanamo -- accessible, secure, offshore and nicely symbolic (the tradition of island exile for those outside the pale of civilization is a venerable one) -- a quite brilliant choice for the placement of terrorists, some of whom, the Bush administration immediately understood, would have to be detained without trial in a war that could be endless.

The genius of democracy is that the rotation of power forces the opposition to come to its senses when it takes over. When the new guys, brought to power by popular will, then adopt the policies of the old guys, a national consensus is forged and a new legitimacy established.

That's happening before our eyes. The Bush policies in the war on terror won't have to await vindication by historians. Obama is doing it day by day. His denials mean nothing. Look at his deeds.

As the WSJ writes today on the same theme,

Mr. Obama's most remarkable Gitmo sleight-of-hand was on the matter of how to handle the hard cases, those who Mr. Obama said "cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people." After acknowledging this was "the toughest issue we will face" and pledging that he would not "release individuals who endanger the American people," the President proposed . . . well, he didn't really say what he'd do, except that whatever it is must be "defensible and lawful." No wonder the ACLU is in a tizzy.

Which brings us back to Guantanamo. The President went out of his way to insist that its existence "likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained," albeit without offering any evidence, and that it "has weakened American security," again based only on assertion. What is a plain fact is that in the seven-plus years that Gitmo has been in operation the American homeland has not been attacked.

It is also a plain fact -- and one the President acknowledged -- that many of the detainees previously released, often under intense pressure from Mr. Obama's anti-antiterror allies, have returned to careers as Taliban commanders and al Qaeda "emirs." The New York Times reported yesterday on an undisclosed Pentagon report that no fewer than one in seven detainees released from Gitmo have returned to jihad.

Mr. Obama called all of this a "mess" that he had inherited, but in truth the mess is of his own haphazard design. He's the one who announced the end of Guantanamo without any plan for what to do with, or where to put, KSM and other killers. Now he's found that his erstwhile allies in Congress and Europe want nothing to do with them. Tell us again why Gitmo should be closed?

We can't send these guys to other countries. No American politician wants them in his state. Do you really want to take the risk that, at some point, these detainees will interact with other prisoners and further radicalize them so that we get more crackpots like the group arrested yesterday plotting to blow up New York synagogues? So what is so wrong now with Guantanamo? It's secure and it's already been constructed. Even Attorney General Eric Holder acknowledges that, contrary to accusations, the treatment of detainees is in accord with the Geneva Convention. For more on how the story of Guantanamo has been distorted, read Arthur Herman's excellent essay in Commentary about the "The Gitmo Myth and the Torture Canard." Sure, opponents here and abroad have criticized it, but criticism is easy. Presenting us with an alternative plan is the tough part and that is the part Obama has not done.