by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n There is much to criticize about President Obama on foreign policy, but increasingly, despite all the \u201creset button\u201d rhetoric and the obligatory nods to the Left, his anti-terrorism policies are becoming near identical extensions (if in cynical fashion) of George Bush\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>\n I can\u2019t think of a present-day anti-terrorism methodology that Team Obama (a) did not at one time blast as anti-constitutional and (b) does not now accept in its near entirety. Apparently, Obama has figured (perhaps rightly) that intercepts, the Patriot Act, Predator air attacks, renditions, tribunals, wiretaps, etc., are necessary, and that their earlier damnation by Obama et al. was simply political demagoguery of the sort necessary to galvanize the left-wing base that, now, forgivingly, accepts these measures as needed.<\/p>\n The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are essentially extensions of the 2006\u20138 Bush-Petraeus counter-insurgency strategies so savagely ridiculed during congressional testimony by Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. Once again, the Left, fortunately for the country, sees the current flip-flopping \u2014 remember Obama\u2019s promise to be out of Iraq by March 2008, or the Biden folly of trisecting Iraq, or Hillary\u2019s \u201csuspension of disbelief\u201d? \u2014 as necessary expediency. Indeed, soon, Iraq is promised to be Obama\u2019s \u201cgreatest achievement.\u201d<\/p>\n Then there is the mandatory sop to those on the left who by this time are getting restless, which might best be called a virtual war against the war against terror. Yes, we have renamed the war with politically-correct euphemisms like \u201coverseas contingency operations\u201d aimed at \u201cman-made disasters\u201d \u2014 but nobody uses those terms privately. I am sure in both the White House and the Pentagon those who count still talk of terrorists and a war against them. So in this case, I use the adjective \u201cvirtual\u201d literally.<\/p>\n We virtually shut down Guatanamo Bay \u2014 and suddenly both the Left and the European moralists went silent. We virtually tried KSM in a civilian court in New York, and that issue disappeared as well. We virtually hounded former CIA interrogators and White House lawyers, and, despite the futility of such loudly announced inquisitions, the very thought of them tantalized their critics.<\/p>\n So here we are back at the beginning \u2014 the Nobel Laureate is a continuance of George Bush on the war against terror; he has sized up both his domestic and foreign supporters and understood that their former outrage was not principled but largely emotional, driven by short-term political considerations, and thus centered on the caricature of a white, male, Christian, Texan cowboy, conjuring up all the easy tropes of anti-Americanism. Obama, to his credit, figured out that the Western world wanted to be kept safe, and that Bush had figured out how to do that, and that his own messianic presence could square that circle by being the un-Bush Bush. And so far such dissimulation has worked \u2014 even on the Right, which is in a quandary over whether to thank Obama for continuing a successful policy or be furious at him both for the prior damage his opportunistic and insincere jeremiads did to Bush and for his present inability to give any credit to his predecessor for protocols that he inherited and embraced. All that is weighed against the far more important fact we are safer because, despite the PC rhetoric, Obama became Bush in matters of anti-terrorism.<\/p>\n So here we are at full circle. Biden and Hillary have evolved from their 2006 fiery anti-Iraq rhetoric into regents of a magnificent \u201caccomplishment\u201d in Iraq. Obama, who once curtly drowned out General Petraeus in open hearing, is now his greatest supporter. We have Ivy League sanction now for blowing up men, women, and anything that breathes in the general vicinity of suspected terrorists targeted by Predator drones \u2014 even as we can still offer soapbox sermons on the waterboarding of three mass murderers and beheaders. Quite simply, intercepting, renditioning wiretapping, and tribunalizing Nobel Laureates with the name Barrack Obama don\u2019t like doing that sort of stuff, so it really, sort of, does not happen. And if it keeps us safe, let the charade continue by all means \u2014 at least as long as anything can when it is based on a contradiction.<\/p>\n \u00a92010 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner There is much to criticize about President Obama on foreign policy, but increasingly, despite all the \u201creset button\u201d rhetoric and the obligatory nods to the Left, his anti-terrorism policies are becoming near identical extensions (if in cynical fashion) of George Bush\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[590],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-rK","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1840,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-top-anti-terrorism-advisor-must-go\/","url_meta":{"origin":1720,"position":0},"title":"Our Top Anti-Terrorism Advisor Must Go","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 9, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Partisanship, Then and Now One of the stranger behaviors of the ever-stranger Obama administration is its sudden adoption of the \"wounded fawn\" posture. No opposition was more stridently critical of a sitting president than was the anti-Bush Left. Barack Obama, as candidate and president,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "February 2010"","block_context":{"text":"February 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/february-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5939,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/terrorism-as-therapy\/","url_meta":{"origin":1720,"position":1},"title":"Terrorism as Therapy","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The Obama administration is intent on downplaying the Islamic roots of contemporary terrorism. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online One common theme emerges from the hearings over the Benghazi disaster: The Obama administration is intent on downplaying the Islamic roots of terrorists who harbor an existential hatred of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Terrorism"","block_context":{"text":"Terrorism","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war-on-terror\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":982,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-un-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":1720,"position":2},"title":"The Un-Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 8, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Barack Obama\u2019s favorability in the polls fell when he acted like himself \u2014 overexposed, hard-left in his press conferences, and boastful about legislative achievements like Obamacare and a stimulus of more than $1 trillion. Then a strange thing happened. Obama largely went quiet.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "First Term Policies"","block_context":{"text":"First Term Policies","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/first-term-policies\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":457,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-ripples-of-911\/","url_meta":{"origin":1720,"position":3},"title":"The Ripples of 9\/11","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 15, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online After the radical Islamist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the foiled effort to ram a fourth jet into the Capitol in Washington, no one envisioned that there would follow eleven years without another major attack. Since September 11,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "9\/11"","block_context":{"text":"9\/11","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war\/911\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5911,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-obama-borg\/","url_meta":{"origin":1720,"position":4},"title":"The Obama Borg","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 30, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"How \"man-caused disasters\" replaced Islamist terrorism in the Obama lexicon. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In\u00a0Star Trek\u00a0lore, the Borg\u00a0was a collective of servile drone operatives that sought to assimilate other species into\u00a0its \u201chive mind.\u201d Something akin to that creepy groupthink arose when the Obama administration took power and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Terrorism"","block_context":{"text":"Terrorism","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war-on-terror\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":720,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-hypocritic-oath\/","url_meta":{"origin":1720,"position":5},"title":"Obama’s Hypocritic Oath","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 17, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Barack Obama has a habit of identifying a supposed crisis in collective morality, damning straw men \u201cthem\u201d who engage in such ethical lapses, soaring with rhetorical bromides \u2014 and then, to national quiet, doing more or less the exact things he once swore\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Second Term Policies"","block_context":{"text":"Second Term Policies","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/second-term-policies\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1720"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1720"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1721,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1720\/revisions\/1721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}