Victor Davis Hanson contends that the “new and improved” administration will be a whole lot like the old one:
FISA and wire-intercepts of terrorist communications in the pre-Obama president months were once derided as more of Ashcroft-Bush stomping on the Constitution — except that now ABC News reports that, in fact, US intelligence agencies supplied India with general knowledge of the rough time period, place, and perhaps even method of terrorist attack. Are we to believe that such newfound capability to warn a country 7000 miles away about terrorist infiltration on its borders would be of no utility here at home?
I think in response what we will see is that insidiously, bit by bit, Obama and the Obama-brand press will begin to drop the shrill rhetoric about destroying constitutional liberties, and replace it with the vocabulary of ambiguity (e.g., try “complex,” “no easy answers”, “problematic”, etc.). Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (mastermind of the 9/11 mass murders) will cool his heels in Gitmo for a bit longer rather than going onto a federal circus trial in NY or DC as a political prisoner with his government-paid-for lawyers seeking to find a sympathetic jury to nullify the evidence in the interest of social justice (I hope David Axlerod has polled the American people on that possible fiasco).
And, remarking “Change has rarely looked so much like continuity,” Rich Lowry finds:
Obama’s national-security choices signal that he’s going to build off the late-second-term “realist” Bush foreign policy, giving it a fresh branding as “change” internationally and augmenting our tools of “soft power” (something Secretary Gates has repeatedly plugged). The one true progressive on his team, Susan Rice, has been relegated to ambassador to the United Nations, where wishful thinking is mostly harmless and soothes the bureaucrats.
Perhaps Obama is simply bowing to the exigencies of American foreign policy, defined by a few ineluctable realities: We are the sole superpower in a dangerous world, full of enemies that only we have the military resources to defeat and of rival powers with interests divergent from ours.
The reality is that reality is a drag. The Iranians still aren’t amenable to negotiations, the victory in Iraq still has to be secured, Islamic terrorists still prowl the globe, and we still have to put those dangerous detainees somewhere. The adage goes: “A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.” Perhaps a center-right commander-in-chief is a liberal academic who’s had some security briefings and now must defend his fellow citizens.
Put differently, there is not an enormous range of options when it comes to defending against terrorists. At least not in the real world. You need surveillance (FISA), detention (if not Guantanamo, then someplace else), and a robust military force that can secure quieting battlefields and win on raging ones. Yes, there can be fewer or more diplomatic feelers and freer or less free trade. We can be more or less serious about containing the North Korean threat. And we can be more or less realistic about the Middle East “peace process.” But unless the world changes radically, U.S. policy can’t. And last time I checked the world was pretty much the same: scary.
