What Ever Happened to the War on Terror?

This is a topic I've written about elsewhere, but it's worth rehashing it once more here, in light of the recent decision by the Obama administration to transfer Gitmo detainees to a prison in Illinois.

The decision comes as no surprise to those of us who have followed the first year of Obama's presidency closely. It began with the president's executive order, mere days after assuming office, to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay by the end of the year. It was an unrealistic, naive deadline...and the policy of closing the prison has been and continues to be opposed by a majority of Americans, who don't agree with the president's decision to elevate international public opinion over our nation's security. A majority of Americans also oppose the administration's incoherent, reckless policy of trying 9/11 plotters Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his henchmen in a civilian court in New York City, rather than using the lawful system of military tribunals set up expressly for this purpose.

These decisions, to close Gitmo, to try KSM and his buddies in a civilian court, and to relocate dangerous Islamic terrorists to US soil, are indicative of an irresponsible, dangerous return to a pre-9/11, Clinton era mentality. During the Clinton years, the US experienced the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the bombing of the USS Cole...yet we continued to treat terrorism as just another criminal offense. The result? A vicious attack that left 3,000 Americans dead on September 11, 2001.

Thankfully, the Bush administration reacted swiftly and decisively to the attack. President Bush did not hesitate in labeling it an act of war and responding to it as such. Every American ought to be grateful for the Bush administration's recognition that, in order to defeat these barbarians, we had to fight them on a war footing. The Bush administration did this abroad by going on the offensive and rooting out the bad guys and the governments who harbored them...but the president, with Congress's help, did it at home, too, with the Patriot Act, the controversial but effective NSA wiretapping program, and the establishment of military tribunals to deal with enemy combatants. These actions, foreign and domestic, fit into the larger framework of a War on Terror...and these policies kept us safe from another attack on American soil for the rest of Bush's term- an accomplishment that few would have been sanguine enough to predict in the hours and days after 9/11/2001.

But despite the success of the War on Terror framework in keeping the homeland safe and our enemies guessing, President Obama and all of the officials in his administration have stopped using the phrase. They don't use the term terrorism too often anymore, and they clearly have absolutely no appetite for using more precise terms to define our enemy: terms like Islamic extremism, or violent jihadism, for example. Their inability to even properly label the violent ideology that we are threatened by, for fear of hurting anyone's feelings, clearly illustrates the administration's complacency. The policies of transferring terrorists to the American heartland and giving others civilian trials in the US court system further shows the administration's determination to return to a pre-9/11 approach to fighting terrorism.

While closing Gitmo and giving KSM a civilian trial may improve our image abroad, it weakens our national security. Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, not President of the World. His apology tours, where he travels to foreign nations and delivers mea culpas on behalf of the USA, don't make our country safer. Closing Gitmo doesn't make our country safer. Is anyone so stupid as to believe the administration when it says that closing Gitmo will remove one of Al Qaeda's recruiting tools? As if suddenly, a bunch of barbaric, Muslim extremists who are hell-bent on slaughtering as many innocent Americans as possible will suddenly decide, hey, those Americans really aren't so bad after all.

We've kept our country safe for 8 plus years now by treating the terrorists as enemy combatants, not common criminals. There is no conceivable reason, outside of playing politics by pandering to the far-left, anti-war loons and those peace-loving Euros who handed him a Nobel prize for doing jack squat, for Obama's policy of abandoning the constitutional system of military tribunals in favor of civilian courts for prosecuting dangerous terrorists. And no reasonable person can possibly believe that bringing bad guys from Cuba into Illinois makes the homeland any safer either.