Oh Oh-bomb-ah

In 2008 was the first time that most people my age (or there about's) have had someone they actually voted for put into office. In 2000, and 2004 this wasn't the case with bush but in 2008 there are many who voted for Obomba. I have always been interested, surprised, and very scared how easily everyone bought into the spectacle.



From- The Globe and Mail

Konrad Yakabuski
Washington — From Friday's Globe and Mail
Published on Thursday, Jan. 07, 2010 10:33PM EST
Last updated on Thursday, Jan. 07, 2010 10:35PM EST
In Year 1, with their worst memories still so raw, Americans embraced him as the anti-Bush. Must he become, in Year 2, Son of Bush?

Barack Obama, who banned the very use of the term “war on terror” in his administration, now finds himself forced to prove he can wage it as ruthlessly as the predecessor whose legacy he so sought to undo.

“I've come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,” the President said in Cairo in June. “This cycle of suspicion and discord must end.”

It sounded so promising. But the goodwill overtures – the vow to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, the vow to uphold the legal rights of suspected terrorists, the vow to reject profiling – have become a luxury Mr. Obama can no longer afford to extend.

Most Americans, for a time at least, aren't interested in what the rest of the world thinks. And Mr. Obama knows it.

“It's clear he had been stressing the differences between his administration and the previous administration. Now, for obvious reasons, he's beginning to stress the similarities between his approach and the Bush administration's approach,” remarked James Lee Ray, a Middle East expert at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Perceived as peaceniks, Democratic presidents may be doomed to overcompensate when confronted with threats to U.S. security. That, after all, is how we got the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam and, arguably, a 30,000-troop surge in Afghanistan.

Hence, Mr. Obama's “We are at war” declaration yesterday might have been expected, along with the kind of profiling language that would normally send grassroots Democrats into a fit: “We know that the vast majority of Muslims reject al-Qaeda. But it is clear that al-Qaeda increasingly seeks to recruit individuals without known terrorist affiliations, not just in the Middle East but in Africa and other places, to do their bidding. That's why I've directed my national security team to develop a strategy that addresses the unique challenges posed by lone recruits.”

To be sure, there were a couple of olive branches to the Muslim world. But where, not long ago, they were all Mr. Obama talked about, they had been reduced to niceties yesterday.

Any post-9/11 president confronted with the systemic intelligence failure that led to the Christmas Day terrorist attempt onboard a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight would, for reasons pertaining to both style and substance, have had to take corrective action. But because of who he is – or at least, who Americans think he is – Mr. Obama has been under even greater pressure to do so.

He brought it upon himself with his move, on his second day in office, to announce the closing of Guantanamo Bay within a year. The Cuban prison where the United States has detained real and suspected terrorists without regard for U.S. or international law had come to symbolize the worst of George W. Bush's presidency of errors.

Just this week, Mr. Obama reiterated his promise to close Gitmo, insisting it has “become a tremendous recruiting tool for al-Qaeda” and “an explicit rationale for the formation of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” the Yemen-based faction to which the would-be Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, adhered.

Yet none of Mr. Obama's Year 1 overtures stopped Mr. Abdulmutallab from continuing his journey to the dark side. And as much as closing Gitmo is desirable for a number of reasons, there is little evidence to suggest doing so would lead aspiring terrorists to renounce their ways.

“To say that as long as we have Guantanamo, people will have become more easily radicalized, or that if we close Guantanamo, they will stop being radicalized, is nonsense,” insisted Maki Haberfeld, a terrorism expert at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. “That really has nothing to do with why people become radicalized.”

For every carrot Mr. Obama waved at the Muslim world, Americans are now demanding he wield an even bigger stick. That was the message of yesterday's speech, where the Gitmo promise was nowhere to be found.

Until yesterday, Mr. Obama had yet to live down his November memorial speech at Fort Hood, the Texas military base where Major Nidal Hasan gunned down 13 active and retired soldiers, in which the President did not once utter the word Muslim. He did not make that mistake yesterday.

Mr. Obama's early eagerness to underscore the differences between his approach to terrorism and that of Mr. Bush has now obliged him to yank the steering wheel in the other direction.

The irony is that, even before the Dec. 25 attempt, there had been a striking continuity between the Obama and Bush administrations in dealing with terrorists and terrorism. Almost all of the worst abuses of the Bush years had been done away with before Mr. Obama took over. Mr. Bush eliminated the use of waterboarding on suspected terrorists and reformed the military commissions before which a few of them faced trial. Mr. Bush also tried some people accused of terrorism in U.S. civil courts. Mr. Obama has promised no more than that. Even Mr. Bush voiced his desire to close Gitmo one day.

It is ironic, too, that someone as nuanced as Mr. Obama actively sought to establish himself as the anti-Bush. In other words, the image he projected of himself was that of a caricature of a caricature.

He risks spending his second year in the Oval Office (over)compensating for that.