Barack Obama and terrorism

Another war president, after all

Jan 7th 2010 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

After the Christmas “screw-up”, new priorities in the White House

“YOU may not be interested in war”, Leon Trotsky is alleged to have said, “but war is interested in you.” On Christmas Eve Barack Obama embarked on a delayed holiday in Hawaii, having lingered to watch the Senate pass its health bill. But thanks to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s bungled Christmas-Day bomb plot, the president returned to Washington this week with more urgent priorities: to fix a broken intelligence system that he says is endangering American lives, and to rebut Republican allegations that he does not “get” the war on terrorism.

On January 5th a visibly angry Mr Obama emerged from a meeting with his security team to say that it was not a failure of intelligence-gathering that allowed Mr Abdulmutallab to board a Detroit-bound flight with a bomb in his underpants: America had possessed “sufficient information” to uncover the plot but “failed to connect those dots”. This was “not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it,” he said. In the meeting itself he was reportedly crosser, denouncing “a screw-up that could have been disastrous”.

Mr Obama has already ordered a raft of new measures, and more are promised. The “no-fly” list (on which Mr Abdulmutallab did not appear) has been expanded. Passengers from 14 countries will face extra screening. There will be more explosive-detecting teams at airports and more sky marshals on airliners. And Mr Obama has suspended plans to send any more detainees from the Guantánamo prison back to Yemen, where al-Qaeda appears to have primed Mr Abdulmutallab, for fear that some might join or rejoin al-Qaeda there.

Such measures seem unlikely to silence those who have seized on the Christmas plot as evidence that Mr Obama does not take terrorism seriously enough. Dick Cheney accused Mr Obama of refusing to admit that America is at war because war “doesn’t fit” with his main goal, which the former vice-president takes to be the “social transformation” of America. Mr Obama’s officials retorted that “seven years of bellicose rhetoric” from a Republican White House had failed to reduce the threat from al-Qaeda (but hedged their bets by pointing out that Mr Obama has in fact often said that America is “at war” with violent extremists).

It is no surprise that the Republicans want to portray Mr Obama as soft on terrorism. Our poll suggests that they have a ready audience: his changes of tone and policy on terrorism have not made Americans feel safe (see chart). And although he has sharpened the administration’s voice since the hapless post-Christmas reaction of his homeland-security secretary, Janet (“the system worked”) Napolitano, some of his policies remain highly controversial.

Despite suspending the release of detainees to Yemen, for example, he still intends to close Guantánamo as soon as he can. Most Republicans were already furious at Mr Obama’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11th atrocities, in a federal court. Now that Mr Abdulmutallab is being treated as a criminal with the right to silence, instead of facing harsh interrogation as an enemy combatant, they have fresh ammunition. John Brennan, the president’s chief adviser on terrorism, was pilloried for suggesting that a would-be suicide-bomber might give up his secrets in return for a plea bargain.

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