PLUS ÇA CHANGE: 43'S AND 44'S COUNTERTERRORISM POLICY?

The rhetoric of the current and previous administrations' counterterrorism policies is very different, and these differences in language and packaging do matter at some level. Moreover, on some important issues—ranging from the discontinuation of enhanced interrogation techniques against terror suspects, the closing of overseas secret prisons, the drawdown of the U.S. military presence in Iraq, a willingness to engage in dialogue with Iran about its nuclear program, and a renewed willingness to participate in international regimes to control environmental change—their concrete behavior has diverged.

But on many other policy issues, particularly those related to the conduct of the global war on terror, there has been striking continuity. Goldsmith identifies a number of such policy areas in which the difference between the two administrations is imperceptible.

First, as the Bush administration did, and contrary to the views of many of his supporters, Obama has framed the conflict with al-Qaeda as a “war,” rather than a criminal matter, and mostly prosecuted it as such. As the President reminded the nation after the failed Christmas underwear bomb plot, “We are at war. We are at war against al-Qaeda, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people, and that is plotting to strike us again” (Obama Reference Obama2010c). The decision to try September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaik Mohammed and his confederates in civilian courts in New York notwithstanding, Obama, like Bush, considers himself a war president, and this has shaped his approach to many other aspects of the war on terrorism.

Second, while Obama might detain fewer terrorist suspects without trial than Bush did, his Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has nonetheless indicated that he would do so in at least some cases, a position which the President recently affirmed (Goldsmith Reference Goldsmith2009).

Third, former constitutional law professor Obama campaigned for the presidency on the platform that habeas corpus—the principle that individuals incarcerated by U.S. officials should be able to petition our courts for release—also applies to prisoners in the war on terror. However, Obama has retreated from this position, particularly regarding its application to detainees at the U.S. prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. There have been reports that if and when the United States turns over control of the prison to Afghan authorities, prisoners will be able to petition for redress in Afghan courts, although the degree to which that ability would really improve their status remains to be seen, given the state of the Afghan judicial system (AFP 2010).

Fourth, while the Obama administration modified the Bush-era military commissions in some ways, it did not, as initially expected, kill them, and the modifications made to date (suppression of evidence derived from torture and increased latitude for defendants to choose their own counsel) represent, at best, evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, change.

Fifth, one area in which Obama has outdone his predecessor in vigor in waging the war on terrorism is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (U.A.V.s) armed with guided missiles to kill Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives in the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Sixth, many perceive CIA Director Leon Panetta's promise to discontinue the practice of extraordinary rendition of terror suspects to countries that are likely to torture them as a dramatic break with the past. But, as Goldsmith points out, this policy shift may be less than meets the eye, given that the Obama administration has not ruled out the practice in general and appears to have adopted the same less stringent criteria employed by the Bush administration to gauge the likelihood that another country will employ torture (see also Spillius Reference Spillius2010).

Seventh, both as a U.S. senator and as a candidate, Obama was critical of the Bush administration's expansive domestic surveillance program in the war on terror. But as president, he has done little to change these Bush-era programs or institute stronger oversight of these activities.

Finally, the Obama administration has thus far not backed away from the expansive “state secrets” definition that the Bush administration used to restrict evidence used in court cases on the grounds that it would compromise intelligence “sources and methods.”

There are at least three additional lines of continuity between the two administrations:

First, both the Bush and Obama administrations regard the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, as one of the defining threats of the twenty-first century, primarily on the grounds that terrorists might somehow obtain them. While their stances are different in nuance (Bush focused more explicitly on rogue states while Obama has pursued a more generic antinuclear agenda), both in practice have focused the bulk of the counter-proliferation efforts on undemocratic, anti-American regimes such as Iran and North Korea and largely ignored pro-American and democratic nuclear powers like Pakistan, India, and Israel (Obama Reference Obama2010b; Obama Reference Obama2010a).

Indeed, the Obama administration has gone to great lengths to highlight the continuity of its efforts with previous administrations in this aspect of its counterterrorism policy (Obama Reference Obama2009d). The President has even quoted with approval Reagan Reagan's famous mantra that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” to justify his effort to abolish all nuclear weapons, an effort that has garnered bipartisan support (Obama Reference Obama2009a).

Second, Obama has shifted the central front in the war on terror from Iraq back to Afghanistan. He initially maintained that the United States is “not in Afghanistan to control that country or to dictate its future,” but rather to defeat al-Qaeda (Obama Reference Obama2009f). But now his strategy for waging the war there bears striking similarities to the strategy employed by the Bush administration in Iraq, including a surge in the number of troops in the theater and a shift toward counterinsurgency and nation-building as the core strategies for winning the war (Desch Reference Desch2009).

Finally, one of the biggest potential changes between Bush's and Obama's foreign policies was assumed to be the latter's reengagement in the Middle East peace process. Beginning with his much-heralded Cairo speech of June 2009, Obama promised to adopt a more evenhanded stance toward the Israelis and the Palestinians, manifested most dramatically in the new President's call for a “freeze” on the construction of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories (Obama and Netanyahu Reference Obama and Netanyahu2009). Despite a very public rebuke of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu after his government announced the construction of 1,600 new housing units in disputed East Jerusalem during a visit by Vice President Biden, the Obama administration nonetheless appears to have retreated to the United States' default position of unconditional support for the Jewish state, with Obama's Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently characterizing Israel's hard-line coalition government's intransigence on settlements as “unprecedented” concessions and her spokesman parroting the Israeli government's dismissal of the report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (Ravid Reference Ravid2009; Guttman Reference Guttman2009; Quandt Reference Quandt2010).

Given these many continuities, Goldsmith's conclusion that “the main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of [counterterror] policy, but rather its packaging” is not wide of the mark (Goldsmith Reference Goldsmith2009). Indeed, from the opposite end of the political spectrum, but reaching a nearly identical set of conclusions, blogger Glenn Greenwald laments that Obama “has actively and affirmatively embraced those very policies as his own—the very policies which Democrats and liberals almost unanimously claimed for years they found so offensive and dangerous—and he has vigorously defended them and repeatedly applied them in numerous circumstances” (Greenwald Reference Greenwald2009, emphasis in original). In other words, there is broad recognition of the extensive continuity between the forty-third and forty-fourth presidents.

WHAT EXPLAINS THIS CONTINUITY?

Goldsmith suggests four possible explanations for the continuity between the two administrations. One is that many of these policies persist simply because it is hard to change policies implemented by the previous administration, and not because of positive commitment to them by the new president. But to endorse this theory is to embrace the implausible notion that even determined presidential effort cannot overcome institutional inertia.

Another explanation is rooted in a core assumption of bureaucratic politics theory: where you sit (as president) determines where you stand (increasing presidential authority)—that is, by virtue of incumbency, a president wants to expand presidential authority. This assumes, though, that the institutional interest of the presidency is clear and unchanging, and that identical policies are the only way to advance it.

A third explanation highlights the differences between campaigning and actually governing, and argues that the exigencies of the latter pushed both administrations in roughly the same direction. It is certainly true that campaigning and governing are two different things, but it does not follow that governing occurs in the same way across administrations. There is, in sum, an element of truth in each of these three explanations, but none fully account for the remarkable continuity between important elements of the Bush and Obama foreign policies.

Goldsmith's fourth explanation, in contrast, explains a large part of the consistency. He points to the broad consensus among the country's political elite that we are in an unprecedented era of peril after September 11 that requires extraordinary measures to survive in. What makes the war on terrorism so dangerous, from the perspective of what historian Arthur Schlesinger referred to as the “vital center” of U.S. politics, is not so much the physical threat of terrorism to the United States, but rather the existential threat to the American way of life as a result of the uncivilized means that adversaries employ in seeking to destroy it (Schlesinger Reference Schlesinger1949).

I explain this tendency to overstate the real—but hardly apocalyptic—threat from terrorism by turning to Louis Hartz's famous observation that, at its core, the United States' liberal tradition contains a “deep and unwritten tyrannical compulsion” that “hampers creative action abroad by identifying the alien [e.g., the nonliberal] with the unintelligible, and it inspires hysteria at home by generating the anxiety that unintelligible things produce” (Hartz Reference Hartz1955, 12, 285). Or, as McKittrick puts it, “With nothing to push against it, [liberalism] thinks in absolutes; the occasional shadows which cross its path quickly lengthen into monsters; every enemy is painted in satanic terms, and it has no idea how it would behave if the enemy were either bigger or different” (McKittrick Reference McKittrick1955). But to put the terrorist threat in perspective, of the roughly 14,000 Americans who were murdered in the United States in 2009, just 14 (or .01%) died as a result of terrorism (Shane Reference Shane2010; Walt Reference Walt2010; Desch Reference Desch2010).

In addition to overstating the threat we face today, America's liberal tradition also understates the difficulty of eliminating it once and for all through such extravagant measures as nation-building and the spread of democracy. Were it not for this liberal tradition, the United States might view the threat from global terrorism in a less alarmist light (more akin to a chronic crime problem than World War IVFootnote ¹) and adopt more restrained policies in response (i.e., containment rather than global transformation).

Despite important differences with its predecessor, there is substantial evidence that the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, embraces the core tenets of America's liberal tradition. For example, the Obama administration shares many elements of the Bush administration's view of the nature of the threat we face. Vice President Joe Biden has warned that, along with the Persian Gulf states and Israel, the United States faces an “existential threat” from Iran's nuclear program, despite no evidence that Iran has made the decision to pursue nuclear weapons and the fact that even if it did, the United States and Israel would retain a huge nuclear advantage.

In a similar vein, President Obama refers to September 11, 2001, as “the deadliest attack on American soil in our history,” neglecting the almost 100,000 deaths as a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent war to defeat Japan (Obama Reference Obama2009g; see also Obama Reference Obama2010a and Biden Reference Biden2009). Like the Bush administration, Obama National Security Advisor General James Jones waxed nostalgic for the “simpler” days of the Cold War threat environment, a period in which we fought wars in which we suffered tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of casualties and faced Armageddon (Jones Reference Jones2009).

As with the Bush administration, the Obama administration underestimates the difficulty of addressing these real, but hardly existential, threats. For example, the President, like his predecessor, continues to link the spread of democracy to U.S. success in Iraq and Afghanistan (Obama and al-Maliki Reference Obama and al-Maliki2009). As he explained in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, echoing classic democratic peace theory, “Only when Europe became free did it finally find peace. America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens” (Obama Reference Obama2010a). This belief has convinced the current administration to commit to nation-building in Afghanistan on the grounds, as the President puts it, that “military power alone will not win this war … We also need diplomacy and development and good governance” (Obama Reference Obama2009e).

Nor are the days of the United States striving for primacy fully past either. Vice President Biden argues that the Obama administration's core foreign policy objective is to “first and foremost, reestablish America's preeminent leadership in the world” (Biden Reference Biden2009; Obama Reference Obama2009b). President Obama justified this effort by reminding the world in Oslo last year that “it was not simply international institutions—not just treaties and declarations—that brought stability to a post–World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States has helped to underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms” (Obama Reference Obama2010a).

Finally, the naïve belief that we can have our cake (vigorously waging the war on terror in much the same way as the previous administration) while eating it too (doing so at no cost to our international standing or our domestic civil liberties) is alive and well in Obama's White House. As the President puts it, “America is unique—because of that fundamental belief that we are committed both to our security and to the rule of law” (Obama Reference Obama2009h), and so we can “reject the false choice between our security and our ideals” (Obama Reference Obama2009c; see also Obama Reference Obama2010a). If only it were so easy.