Blogs

In his speech at the National Defense University on Thursday, President Obama made one of the most sensible, realistic, thorough and truthful statements about terrorism and counterterrorism from any senior official, let alone a president. The speech was not a piece of oratorical artwork, and it probably will not have the popular resonance of many of his other utterances. But in the sheer quality of its substance, the speech was one of his best.

The welcome and needed main message was that the United States must and should get off the track of waging a “boundless 'global war on terror.'” Accompanying that message was an accurate description of the terrorist threats that do and do not endanger U.S. interests. The president explained how the main problem is not what is left of the core al-Qaeda group but instead some parts of an assortment of foreign offshoots as well as radicalized individuals in the United States. Many of the foreign groups, including some that have adopted the al-Qaeda brand name, are primarily focused on local matters and do not pose any significant threat to U.S. interests.

Mr. Obama was candid in what can and cannot be done in countering terrorism. We “cannot erase” violent extremism. He talked of some of the vulnerabilities that are unavoidable, including the dangers faced by U.S. diplomats serving in trouble-prone places such as Libya.

Reasonable people can disagree on what to do about Syria, a problem with no good solutions, and particularly about what to do regarding aid to Syrian rebels. There ought not to be disagreement, however, on not letting the United States, a would-be benefactor, get pushed around or have its diplomacy subverted by the rebels, who are the supplicants. Yet that becomes a possibility when we hear the head of the rebel Syrian National Coalition throw cold water on the peace conference that Secretary of State Kerry and his Russian counterpart agreed to arrange and say that his group will withhold agreement to attend until it sees who from the Assad regime might be coming.

In a public statement at this week's “Friends of Syria” meeting, Kerry linked the concept of increased aid to the rebels to any unwillingness by the Assad regime to participate in peace talks. One hopes he has conveyed a converse message in private to rebel representatives. There would be nothing wrong with also making such a message public. It would be part of a consistent policy whereby U.S. decisions about aid to rebels would be governed by the willingness or unwillingness of each side to negotiate and to negotiate seriously.

Here is the depth to which the Obama administration has sunk: "If you’re asking me whether the president believes that journalists should be prosecuted for doing their jobs, the answer is no.” So said White House spokesman Jay Carney. Good to know. Presumably, reporters everywhere are relieved to know that Obama thinks it's OK if they continue to trying to ferret out information.

Carney, himself a former reporter, felt obliged to reassure his jittery colleagues because of the latest leak case to embarrass the administration. It centers on James Rosen, an industrious and shrewd and affable reporter for Fox News. Rosen, if I may say so, is not the first person who leaps to mind as "at the very least, either . . . an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator" in an espionage case allegedly directed at the U.S. government. Rosen, who is a friend of mine, has always been a staunch conservative, a foreign-policy hawk, and an expert on subjects ranging from the Beatles and Watergate. But to suppose that Rosen would be involved in trying to subvert the American government is about as plausible as the idea that Obama secretly wants to slash taxes on the wealthy.

Public discussion of the subpoena of telephone records of Associated Press reporters as part of a leak investigation has been impaired by widespread ignorance or misunderstanding of what is going on with this case, as well as by the political environment in which the issue has surfaced. To begin with, none of us on the outside have any good basis for assessing the importance or potential importance of the phone records to this particular investigation. We don't know what other leads the investigators have, and we don't know the breadth of follow-up implied by whatever leads they do have. We thus have little or no ground as uninformed critics for second-guessing how the FBI is handling the case, in terms of obtaining the records at all or of the extent of the records that were subpoenaed.

The damage of leaks appears to be widely misunderstood, given how swiftly many commentators are brushing aside the issue of damage in the current case. Leaking of classified information significantly harms national security because it is awfully hard to run an effective national security operation if what stays secret and what becomes public is determined by any individual with an ax to grind or a personal agenda to push and enough of a wild streak to break the rules. Some commentary has offered opinion on how much the particular leak that is apparently in question in the current case was or was not damaging, but that is too narrow a perspective. Any leak is a blow to the discipline needed to keep secret information secret.

Sen. Rand Paul has been taking a number of moves to test the waters when it comes to running for the presidency. He garnered headlines in taking on President Obama about drone strikes. He addressed the Heritage Foundation, where he said, "I'm a realist, not a neoconservative nor an isolationist." He recently spoke at the GOP's annual Lincoln Day Dinner in Cedar Rapids. But no step might have more symbolic weight than if he were to apply for membership in the Council on Foreign Relations.

In the Weekly Standard, Bruce Bawer reviews Jeremy Scahill’s recent book, Dirty Wars, which is about America’s approach to war, counterterrorism and targeted killings over the past decade. Bawer’s review is an ugly piece of work that is awash in evidence-free assertions and attacks on Scahill’s character. He calls Scahill “a radical ideologue out to discredit America and debilitate its defenses,” and closes with this paragraph:

What Scahill has given us here is, in short, an indictment of the West’s entire post-9/11 struggle against jihad. To offer serious criticism of American strategy is, of course, thoroughly legitimate. But Scahill isn’t a patriot who wants to see America triumph. On the contrary, it seems clear that the only thing he would hate more than a mismanaged war on jihad would be a successful one. Indeed, it’s hard to avoid feeling that this book’s definitive goal, like that of Awlaki’s sermons, is to swell the jihadist ranks—anything to bring down the Evil Empire with which Scahill has been at war all his professional life.

Courtesy of Pew Despite the fact that the conflict in Syria has been raging for over two years, many Americans (some of whom undoubtedly want us to intervene there) fail to accurately identify the country when asked.

Today, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released the results of a January poll indicating that only 50 percent of respondents were able to identify Syria correctly when shaded on a map. Nearly one in five (19 percent) named the country as Turkey (no word on Erdogan's thoughts on this), and 11 percent thought it was Saudi Arabia. Five percent identified it as Egypt, and 15 very, very sad percent found the question too daunting to answer.

For comparison, about 79 percent of people were able to correctly identify the Twitter logo in a recent Pew survey.

The victor in the recent Pakistani elections, Nawaz Sharif, has indicated he places high priority on improving relations between Pakistan and India. Sharif made some significant strides in promoting detente between the two South Asia powers during a previous stint as prime minister, and he wants to recoup ground that was later lost after the terrorist attack in Mumbai in 2008 by a Pakistani-based group. Wasting no time, Sharif has invited Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Pakistan to attend Sharif's swearing-in.

This is all to the good, and has received recognition as such in India (although with caution in the case of the right-wing nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party). Americans, however, need to be prepared for how a successful Sharif may bring about some changes in Pakistani-U.S. relations that may not seem so good in Washington. This is suggested by an editorial earlier this week in a major Indian daily, the Hindustan Times. The editorial said that part of what Indians ought to hope for from a new administration in Islamabad is “a government that will understand that cutting dependence on the United States and China is only possible if Pakistan has a modus vivendi with India.” Note the implication that understandably can raise American eyebrows: a looser Pakistani relationship with the United States may accompany a less hostile Pakistani relationship with India.

Daniel Klaidman’s cover story in the current issue of Newsweek is about the Obama administration and its approach to the prison in Guantánamo Bay. He picks up on President Obama’s comments two weeks ago—in which the president said that the prison “needs to be closed” and that he “was going to go back at” the challenge of closing it—and reports on the administration’s thinking and the obstacles to doing so.

Possibly the biggest piece of news in Klaidman’s story is this:

In the coming days, Obama plans to address both Guantánamo and drones—another festering, controversial element of the administration’s national-security agenda—in a broad “framing” speech that will try to knit together an overarching approach to counterterrorism. In the speech, Obama plans to lay out a legal framework for the administration’s evolving strategies on targeting, detention, and prosecution.

Klaidman tells us that the “interagency wrangling” over the contents of the speech “has apparently taken months,” and that the speech “had been scheduled for last month but was then abruptly rescheduled.” One imagines that the Boston Marathon bombing was the reason why. (Klaidman also reports that in the wake of the bombing, Obama “will also address the evolving threat of self-radicalization and lone wolves.”)

There is a curious paradox in criticisms of President Obama from the right. On the one hand it complains that he is vastly expanding the range and reach of government domestically. On the other hand it complains that he is not expanding the range and reach of government enough in foreign affairs.

A good case of the latter impulse comes in a lively recent column by Bret Stephens, a leading neoconservative columnist for the Wall Street Journal and winner of a Pulitzer prize. Stephens raises what he calls the "Kissinger question," which, as he defines it, is whether or not America needs a foreign policy at all, the title of a book that Kissinger published a few months before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In Stephens' view, America, under Obama, does not. It has what amounts to a series of tactical moves designed to obscure the fact that Obama is, at bottom, uninterested in foreign affairs. Stephens goes on to suggest that this presidential disposition is widely shared. Even Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass comes in for a drubbing—he, of all people, Stephens warns, has suggested in a pithy new book that foreign policy, given the battered state of the American economy and the dubious outcomes of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, should begin at home.

As Stephens sees it,