From Weekend Edition of the Wall Street Journal:
Commander in Doubt
Nowhere in Obama's speech did he mention the abiding threat: WMD.
President Obama delivered one of the more remarkable speeches of his Presidency on Thursday, or for that matter of any recent President. The Commander in Chief who has ruthlessly used nearly all of the antiterror tools bequeathed by his predecessor has suddenly declared that the war on terror is all but over, and he invited Congress to put new limits on his war powers.
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"The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self," he said in 7,000 words at National Defense University. "Groups like AQAP [al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States. Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don't need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states."
If this logic sounds familiar, that's because it is the way the U.S. thought about terrorism before 9/11. Terrorists were a disparate and minor threat, one that could be handled by law enforcement and intelligence, not with the tools of war. We learned differently 12 years ago, but now Mr. Obama is saying it is safe to return to that mindset.
The President is right that "core al Qaeda" has been diminished, but in the next breath he also concedes that it has "shifted and evolved." Jihadist outfits now spread across North and East Africa, through most of the Middle East to Pakistan. They are less concentrated than they once were in Afghanistan, but in some ways more dangerous for that. One of them killed four Americans in Benghazi, and other Islamists inspired the Boston marathon bomber.
In 1999, Bill Clinton thought al Qaeda was a small band that posed a limited threat abroad. One of the lessons of post-9/11 policy was to keep the pressure on these groups so they can't become comfortable enough to plot attacks on the U.S. That requires war powers like drone strikes, special-forces raids and extended detention.
Yet Mr. Obama announced that he has put new limits on the drone strikes he so greatly expanded. Shifting drone operations to the Pentagon from the CIA may make sense for such a kinetic program, though the spy agency has often been more nimble than the defense bureaucracy.
More troubling is Mr. Obama's vow to use drones in the future only if there is "near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured." Mr. Obama didn't say that U.S. drones, with their precision and ability to linger over a target, already limit civilian casualties like no aerial weapon in history. Near-certainty is an almost impossible standard to meet, and announcing it only invites terrorists to hide among more civilians.
White House officials also say that future drone targets must pose a "continuing and imminent threat" to the U.S., a higher bar than the previous standard of "significant threat." This new threshold still leaves wiggle room, but the clear political message to U.S. generals is to take no risks. The number of drone strikes has already dropped from a high of 121 in 2010 to 23 so far this year.
Mr. Obama even invited Congress to work with him to enshrine limits in law. He said Congress could establish "a special court to evaluate and authorize lethal action" or create "an independent oversight board in the executive branch" to second-guess drone decisions.
The second idea is only slightly less dreadful than the first, which would put judges with no military expertise in the chain of command. Both undermine the President's constitutional authority to conduct wars. Mr. Obama mentioned the potential problems with this oversight, but even suggesting it is an invitation to a Rand Paul-Nancy Pelosi coalition to make it a political cause.
As he did in his re-election campaign, Mr. Obama also made much of the understandable American yearning for peace. "This war, like all wars, must end," he averred. "That's what history advises. That's what our democracy demands." And he invited Congress to revise and limit its post-9/11 war authorization that has served as the main (but far from the only) legal basis for military operations against terrorists.
This will please those on the left who never supported the war on terror, but it omits that Congress has re-endorsed that 2001 language in its periodic defense authorization bills. It also neglects that the best analogy to the current conflict is the Cold War, which lasted more than 40 years from the Truman Doctrine through the fall of the Soviet Union.
The U.S. managed to fight, and win, that extended conflict without great affront to our values or liberties, or for that matter without declarations of war by Congress. As America's Afghan campaign ends, the antiterror conflict will be fought on many fronts as the Cold War was. The battles will often be in the shadows, with periodic military strikes or troop deployments, that shouldn't require Congressional approval for every new military action or every new battlefield.
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The reality is that the terrorist threat is also likely to last for decades, and it may increase as technology advances. The single most striking fact of Mr. Obama's speech is that he never mentioned weapons of mass destruction. Yet WMD in the hands of terrorists is the greatest threat of all, and no one should doubt that al Qaeda or Hezbollah or Iran's Revolutionary Guards would use them.
Though the anti-antiterror critics will never admit it, the U.S. has done very well balancing security and freedom since 9/11. It is precisely this success that is giving Mr. Obama an opening to claim victory. He risks squandering it by suggesting that we can now safely return to the policies and complacency that led to 9/11.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...369583716.html