Now Daniel Henninger of the WSJ Agrees with Me
As long time readers of this space know, I've been highlighting all the national security policy positions I could over the last 13 months where I supported President Obama. I've written quite a few emails to influential folks hoping that they's join me in my tactic. Apparently someone at the Wall Street Journal shared one of my recent emails with columnist Daniel Henninger. Here is Mr. Henninger's piece from yesterday:
An Obama-GOP Entente on Terror Daniel Henninger
The Wall Street Journal
January 15, 2010
After Barack Obama won the election, several Bush appointees running the war on terror came by our offices to sum up. On each visit, one point recurred: Coming into this world from the outside, they soon realized the scale of responsibility was larger than anything they had imagined.
If the Hasan massacre at Fort Hood didn't bring Barack Obama to this moment, I'm guessing the holidays' two terror horrors did. On Christmas, a suicide bomber came close to filling the Michigan sky with several hundred bodies. Days later, physician and suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi blew up and killed seven CIA officers or contractors in Afghanistan. The Taliban then released a pre-bomb video of Balawi promising more revenge "inside and outside America."
The Internet guarantees there is little chance this madness will burn itself out. A Jordanian doctor and a kid from a Nigerian banking family show how for the first time in history we have a homicidal ideology yoked to religion, which relentlessly draws energy and soldiers from the new phenomenon of the Web.
We have arrived at a familiar place—a U.S. president realizing that he is facing a determined and cruel enemy. Who in our politics, besides his foreign policy team, will stay the course with him the next three years?
His own party?
For seven years after 9/11, the Democratic Party and its legal and media satellites waged a pitched battle against the Patriot Act and the rest of the Bush antiterror program—Guantanamo, wiretaps, the Swift program to monitor terrorist money flows.
The generation of Democrats who now hold seats in Congress appear to have no real interest in the operational details of national security, other than thwarting it or complaining about it. Their energies and interests appear to be wholly directed to gathering political power to pursue an exclusively domestic agenda, such as the health-care slog, card check or carbon taxes. It's a weird form of isolationism.
Mr. Obama's domestic agenda reflects these biases, and that has produced a relentless counteroffensive from the GOP and conservatives.
National security, however, is another matter.
The Afghanistan decision was a big deal; if it went wrong, we were cooked on national security. It didn't. Mr. Obama's decision to support Gen. Stanley McCrystal's counterinsurgency plan in Afghanistan was a procedural mess but arrived at the right result. Surely this happened because his national-security team pushed hard for that.
What emerged from the Afghan decision is that unlike the Congress or Cabinet, the Obama national security team has serious people on it. Defense Secretary Bob Gates, who served George Bush for two years, has re-upped for another. Leon Panetta is at CIA, Denny Blair is the national intelligence director, Adm. Mike Mullen is chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Mr. Obama retained Doug Lute, Mr. Bush's adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan. His top Army generals are David Petraeus, Stan McCrystal and Ray Odierno. The Marines are solid. By most accounts, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was a factor in getting the Afghan decision to the right place.
This crucially important corner of the Obama presidency deserves the support from Republicans and conservatives. The Reid-Pelosi Democrats obliterated Sen. Arthur Vandenberg's useful Cold War dictum that politics stops at the water's edge. That was one of the most dangerous casualties of the past decade, telling the al Qaeda network we were hopelessly divided about our own security.
Republicans have a chance to show the Democrats, and the American people, how a responsible opposition handles national security and foreign policy. No opposition should roll over for a president, but rolling over its own country is worse. As with the support for the president on Afghanistan, an Obama-GOP entente on terror is in the nation's immediate national interest.
This won't be easy. Even with these good Obama advisers in place, it seems this administration is always drawing to an inside straight on national security.
They make it harder than it should be. No coherent intellectual framework exists for their version of fighting terror. The rhetoric is frequently awful. The White House political staff is an unreliable ally. Eric Holder's indictments of the CIA interrogators loom (would anyone have objected to waterboarding Dr. Balawi if his cover had been blown?). Mr. Obama's left wing in Congress and the party base won't help, and the days of organized labor's reliability on national security are gone. The cool Mr. Obama's own commitment will always be hard to read.
Who's left? The right. The right has to find a way to separate the daily anti-Obama domestic policy wars (the front on which the 2010 election should be fought) from the hard complexities of the war on terror. Those two holiday horrors were a cold shower. I don't care what they call this war if they start pushing antiterror policy in the right direction. The price of not giving this president more support than he gave George W. Bush is to let all the stone killers the jihadis can create over the next three years think they've got a shot. No thanks. (End of Daniel Henninger's concise summation of a year of my work.)
Because I like to be ZACKlyRight just a bit more than I like to be first, I delayed in this post until after the special election in Massachusetts to fill the Scott Brown US Senate seat. Turns out I'll be right and still be first because I have not yet read or heard anyone else tell the future as I'm telling it.
