If President Obama tuned in to the past week’s bracing debate on Capitol Hill about terrorism, executive power, secrecy and due process, he might have recognised the arguments his critics were making: He once made some of them himself.
Four years into his tenure, the onetime critic of President George W Bush finds himself cast as a present-day Bush, justifying the muscular application of force in the defence of the nation, while detractors complain that he has sacrificed the country’s core values in the name of security, according to a New York Times report.
The debate is not an exact parallel to those of the Bush era, and Obama can point to ways he has tried to exorcise what he sees as the excesses of the last administration. But in broad terms, the conversation generated by the confirmation hearing of John O Brennan, his nominee for CIA director, underscored the degree to which Obama has embraced some of Bush’s approach to counterterrorism, right down to a secret legal memo authorising presidential action unfettered by outside forces.
At the same time, a separate hearing in Congress revealed how far Obama has gone to avoid what he sees as Bush’s central mistake. Testimony indicated that the president had overruled his secretaries of state and defense and his military commanders when they advised arming rebels in Syria.
With troops only recently home from Iraq, Obama made clear that he was so intent on staying out of another war against a Middle East tyrant that he did not want to be involved even by proxy, especially if the proxies might be questionable, according to Baker.
Critics on the left saw abuse of power, and critics on the right saw passivity.
The confluence of these debates suggests the ways Obama is willing to emulate Bush and the ways he is not, Baker says, adding that in effect, Obama relies on his predecessor’s aggressive approach in one area to avoid Bush’s even more aggressive approach in others. By emphasising drone strikes, Obama need not bother with the tricky issues of detention and interrogation because terrorists tracked down on his watch are generally incinerated from the sky, not captured and questioned. By dispensing with concerns about due process, he avoids a more traditional war that he fears could lead to American boots on the ground.
“I’d argue the shift to more targeted action against AQ has been a hallmark of Obama’s approach against terrorism, whereas Iraq was Bush’s signature decision in his global war on terror,” said Benjamin J Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to Obama, using the initials for Al Qaeda.
The Brennan hearing highlighted the convoluted politics of terrorism. Conservatives complained that if Bush had done what Obama has done, he would have been eviscerated by liberals and the news media. But perhaps more than ever before in Obama’s tenure, liberals voiced sustained grievance over the president’s choices.
“That memo coming out, I think, was a wake-up call,” said Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union. “These last few days, it was like being back in the Bush days.”
“It’s causing a lot of cognitive dissonance for a lot of people,” he added. “It’s not the President Obama they thought they knew,” writes Baker.
The dissonance is due in part to the fact that Obama ran in 2008 against Bush’s first-term policies but, after winning, inherited Bush’s second-term policies.
By the time Bush left office, he had shaved off some of the more controversial edges of his counterterrorism programme, both because of pressure from Congress and the courts and because he wanted to leave behind policies that would endure. He had closed the secret CIA prisons, obtained Congressional approval for warrantless surveillance and military commissions, and worked to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
So while Obama banned harsh interrogation techniques, he preserved much of what he inherited, with some additional safeguards; expanded Bush’s drone campaign; and kept on veterans of the antiterrorism wars like Brennan. Some efforts at change were thwarted, like his vow to close the Guantánamo prison and to try Sept 11 plotters in civilian court.
