When his country was violently attacked, one leader responded with idealistic mantras about nationalism and the American spirit.
Another said little about the ideological or structural roots of terrorism – instead, he’s overseeing a global effort to kill terrorists. This means unmanned drones raining fire over the skies of Yemen and Navy SEALs flying into Pakistan under the cover of night, killing a terrorist and getting the hell out — all without asking for permission or even telling the Pakistani government.
As you might have figured out, I am describing, in a slightly caricatured fashion, the counter-terrorism policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Of course, I’ve left out one important policy distinction – Bush supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq while Obama opposed it. But there are important continuities between the two, like the surveillance and detainee policies that Bush implemented, which have been left largely unchanged by the Obama administration.
But the caricature illuminates an important point. Bush saw the war on terrorism as a global ideological conflict that would end not when the leaders of Al Qaeda who ordered and organized the Sept. 11 attacks were dead, but when freedom reigned all over the globe. In his second inaugural address, Bush said, “For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny – prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder – violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat.” The implication of this view was that the war on terrorism was a war on dictatorship and a war on behalf of democracy. And so we invaded Iraq, a country that was suffering under the long rule of Saddam Hussein, one of history’s greatest monsters but not a central figure in the terrorist war on the United States. President Obama does not speak about terrorism in this way-he barely talks about terrorism at all. But his approach is centered on just killing the terrorists, wherever they may be, and it actually appears to be working.
There is no better symbol for this approach to terrorism than the unmanned drone strike. The Predator drone does nothing to assuage those who “simmer in resentment and tyranny” and does not offer an intellectual challenge to “ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder.” It instead fires missiles that destroy terrorist compounds and incinerate those inside them. And Obama loves them.
Thomas Sanderson, a national security fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told CBS News that Obama has “increased their use and he has shifted the U.S. attention full front to Afghanistan.” And it’s not just drones and not just Afghanistan.
The raid that killed Osama bin Laden was hardly the first secret SEAL mission that went after a terrorist target in a country that does not officially welcome American troops.
According to Marc Ambinder in National Journal, in 2009 President Obama “authorized a large expansion of clandestine military and intelligence operations worldwide, sanctioning activities in more than a dozen countries.”
This means covert military action not just in Pakistan, where it is widely thought the organizational core of Al Qaeda is present, but also in Somalia and Yemen, countries that house terrorist groups but not the core Al Qaeda group that attacked America on Sept. 11.
By many accounts, these covert actions are working. Senior Al Qaeda members are turning up dead left and right and many intelligence analysts think the organization has been significantly weakened.
While it may be worrisome to see increased budgets and operating authority for military units that are necessarily covert and shadowy, perhaps it can show that the most obvious solution to terrorism – killing terrorists – will work on its own. And that could be Obama’s biggest repudiation of the Bush legacy.
Matt Zeitlin is a Weinberg senior.
He can be reached at [email protected]
