Either by design or through incompetence, the Obama administration’s war on terror has become indefinable. In fact, to the degree that there are identifiable policies, they seem either internally contradictory or at odds with other administration policies.
THE INHERITED PROTOCOLSWhat is the current Obama position on the so-called Bush-era war-on-terror protocols? Are they still useful in stopping terrorists, irrelevant, toxic, or sort of all three? The administration has never given us an explanation of its attitude toward the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay, the use of military tribunals, the exact status of renditions, the use of preventive detention, and the employment of the Patriot Act, especially wiretaps and intercepts.
To the extent that anyone could define the present anti-terrorism policy, it might be paraphrased along the following lines: “We rejected these protocols when, as outside critics, there was partisan advantage in doing so. But after assuming office, we found them useful, embraced most of them and even expanded some, preferred to ignore that about-face, assumed that the global and the domestic Left would not object any longer — given that their opposition was more to Bush than to his policies per se — and wish to continue these measures even as we keep quiet about them.”
THE EUPHEMISM WARSimultaneously with the flip-flop over the Bush inheritance, the administration also waged an ancillary war of euphemism. Jihad was not to be defined as an Islamist holy war against the West, but was to be officially regarded as a sort of Deepak Chopra personal struggle to achieve spiritual purity. The words Islamist and Islamism fell out of use. “The War on Terror” was rightly derided as a war against a tactic, but the phrase was wrongly not replaced with a more honest and accurate “War on radical Islamists, jihadists, and Salafists.” Absurdities, like “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters,” followed and yet were not seriously employed for more than a week even by those who coined them. According to the Department of Defense, “workplace violence” best explained Major Hasan’s butchery of 13 of his fellow soldiers at Ford Hood — an act whose real significance was the possible harm to the military’s vaunted diversity program.
THE DRONE KILLINGSFrom 2005 to 2008 the U.S. may have killed between 200 and 700 enemy combatants or suspected terrorists through some 50 or so strikes by pilotless drones. Originally, the program was either used in close support of U.S. troops fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan — drones being more or less equivalent to manned bombing missions or missile or mortar strikes — or employed against suspected al-Qaeda terrorists on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Such strikes were, nonetheless, often criticized by the Left as leaving the theater of war and entering the realm of contract assassination.
Yet in the first four years of the Obama administration, the program was vastly expanded, as the kill tally soared to between 2,500 and 3,000 from some 300 or so strikes. Indeed, although the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq were supposedly winding down, the Obama administration probably killed more suspects by drone in its first year than had the Bush administration in its entire eight-year tenure. Even more important than the vastly greater frequency, Obama brought some new dimensions to the drone attacks : 1) The targeted killings were used far distant from ongoing warfronts and well apart from support for ground troops, as the U.S. now blew apart suspects — including American citizens — as far away as Yemen and the Horn of Africa. A Predator was no longer analogous to a pilotless F-16 used against enemy forces in the field, but more a sort of super-telescopic assassination rifle aimed, in Cold War–era style, against suspected individual enemy agents. 2) The program was institutionalized, on the theory that the Left would not dare object and thereby endanger the Obama domestic agenda. (The Right, it was assumed, would keep quiet, content at least that the judge, jury, and executioner Predators were putting some fear into jihadists as we withdrew from the Middle East.) So much a part of the American political scene have Predator drones become that Obama off-handedly joked about using them against any potential suitors of his two daughters. (Imagine, a decade ago, George W. Bush joking about such lethal forces keeping young men away from his daughters.) We would read in addition, through timely leaks from administration aides, that Obama sought philosophical guidance from moralists like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas before he signed off on the next suspect to be blown up. Such agonizing apparently meant that an intellectual rather than a redneck was pulling the trigger. The result is that few now remember that the United States used to object vehemently to the Israelis’ use of the same tactic of airborne targeted assassination against Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank.
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Israel’s Shortsighted Assassination
AHMED AL-JABARI — the strongman of Hamas, the head of its military wing, the man responsible for the abduction of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit — was assassinated on Wednesday by Israeli missiles.
Why? Israel’s government has declared that the aim of the current strikes against Gaza is to rebuild deterrence so that no rockets will be fired on Israel. Israel’s targeted killings of Hamas leaders in the past sent the Hamas leadership underground and prevented rocket attacks on Israel temporarily. According to Israeli leaders, deterrence will be achieved once again by targeting and killing military and political leaders in Gaza and hitting hard at Hamas’s military infrastructure. But this policy has never been effective in the long term, even when the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, was killed by Israel. Hamas didn’t lay down its guns then, and it won’t stop firing rockets at Israel now without a cease-fire agreement.
When we were negotiating with Hamas to release Mr. Shalit, members of the Israeli team believed that Mr. Jabari wouldn’t make a deal because holding Mr. Shalit was a kind of “life insurance policy.” As long as Mr. Jabari held Mr. Shalit, Israelis believed, the Hamas leader knew he was safe. The Israeli government had a freer hand to kill Mr. Jabari after Mr. Shalit was released in October 2011. His insurance policy was linked to their assessment of the value of keeping him alive. This week, that policy expired.
I believe that Israel made a grave and irresponsible strategic error by deciding to kill Mr. Jabari. No, Mr. Jabari was not a man of peace; he didn’t believe in peace with Israel and refused to have any direct contact with Israeli leaders and even nonofficials like me. My indirect dealings with Mr. Jabari were handled through my Hamas counterpart, Ghazi Hamad, the deputy foreign minister of Hamas, who had received Mr. Jabari’s authorization to deal directly with me. Since Mr. Jabari took over the military wing of Hamas, the only Israeli who spoke with him directly was Mr. Shalit, who was escorted out of Gaza by Mr. Jabari himself. (It is important to recall that Mr. Jabari not only abducted Mr. Shalit, but he also kept him alive and ensured that he was cared for during his captivity.)
Passing messages between the two sides, I was able to learn firsthand that Mr. Jabari wasn’t just interested in a long-term cease-fire; he was also the person responsible for enforcing previous cease-fire understandings brokered by the Egyptian intelligence agency. Mr. Jabari enforced those cease-fires only after confirming that Israel was prepared to stop its attacks on Gaza. On the morning that he was killed, Mr. Jabari received a draft proposal for an extended cease-fire with Israel, including mechanisms that would verify intentions and ensure compliance. This draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, Mr. Hamad, when we met last week in Egypt.
The goal was to move beyond the patterns of the past. For years, it has been the same story: Israeli intelligence discovers information about an impending terrorist attack from Gaza. The Israeli Army takes pre-emptive action with an airstrike against the suspected terror cells, which are often made up of fighters from groups like Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees or Salafi groups not under Hamas’s control but functioning within its territory. These cells launch rockets into Israeli towns near Gaza, and they often miss their targets. The Israeli Air Force responds swiftly. The typical result is between 10 and 25 casualties in Gaza, zero casualties in Israel and huge amounts of property damage on both sides.
Other key Hamas leaders and members of the Shura Council, its senior decision-making body, supported a new cease-fire effort because they, like Mr. Jabari, understood the futility of successive rocket attacks against Israel that left no real damage on Israel and dozens of casualties in Gaza. Mr. Jabari was not prepared to give up the strategy of “resistance,” meaning fighting Israel, but he saw the need for a new strategy and was prepared to agree to a long-term cease-fire.
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