Thread: Worse. Than. Carter.

citanon,

If the aim was to give flexibility than "adjustment" was the right word, not "withdrawal".

"Withdrawal" gives a slight political cushion and creates constant pressure to, you guessed it, withdrawal. I don't see how this gives the DoD flexibility.

The move has been politicized because Obama made it into a political move.

read my post to blues above. there are dual competing pressures of showing commitment and fighting moral hazard.

btw, did you speak up in the same way when bush proposed withdrawal from iraq very shortly after the surge troops were finally in place? was this politicized, too, and gave only half-hearted support?

I don't think even Bush himself would claim credit for coming up with the plan. The decision to adopt the plan and support its developers, yes, but people on the ground had to figure out what to do.

actually, the surge plan was developed by people far from iraq; people like ret. gen jack keane. bush actually overruled his own CJCS, whom are informed by the people on the ground. the iraqi surge was pushed by the white house, advised by keane and petraeus, with input from the NSC.

so by the same measure, was bush's decision-making process a poor one by not accepting the wisdom offered to him by the troops on the ground?

i would argue both bush and obama did what CINCs are supposed to do: question the wisdom when things are going wrong, set appropriate war aims (again, same with bush; his explained war aims of 2008 were certainly different from the aims of, say, late 2003), and order a general review of strategy.

keith,

I know it's not simple, and I never suggested that it was, and if you're reading me that way, I must tell YOU that I'm reading you as having no issues with the handling of the whole dam' mess.

but the way you're framing it makes it look so: ie "obama the fool, coward, and america-hater is ready to cut and run, dooming us all." not much subtlety and thoughts of strategic balance in that.
look, i had and have my issues with obama's decision-making process; however, what i reject is the premise that 1. obama took too long (see shek's post on the issue), 2. obama screwed his COCOM because he wanted to politicize it.

It's been a god-awful screwed up hash, and it shows just how unprepared this neophyte is to even BE the C-in-C, and how uninterested he's been in what is clearly a distraction that he's been forced to grudgingly tackle while what he REALLY wants is to re-make American society, and not quibble over who gets to re-make Afghanistan's.

well, i knew you thought that

anyway, i think the root of our disagreement lies here: you make no distinction between obama as politician and obama as POTUS/CINC. i certainly agree that sometimes he'll act the politico, but i also recognize other times when he's mixing the two roles and when he's making a judgment call as POTUS/CINC.

thus, you believe obama's both dumber than dirt (for being a liberal) AND more devious than a snake (for being a popular dem)-- something OOE remarked before, and i believe still to be incongruous.

that also sets up a "tails i win, heads you lose" scenario: most of the time obama is a perpetual screw-up, but if obama does something you consider right (once in a blue moon), it is because he is forced to, politically, or at best because it serves as window dressing.

ironically, left-wing libs think this way too-- it's called bush derangement syndrome!

anyway, keith, when you get the chance give me a call or send an e-mail over; lots of stuff we can't discuss here, unfortunately.

Astralis:

Originally Posted by astralis

citanon,

read my post to blues above. there are dual competing pressures of showing commitment and fighting moral hazard.

btw, did you speak up in the same way when bush proposed withdrawal from iraq very shortly after the surge troops were finally in place? was this politicized, too, and gave only half-hearted support?

From first paragraph of the story you linked:

Trying to secure more time to allow his strategy to work, Bush -- in a televised prime-time address -- embraced recommendations by his top commander in Iraq for a limited withdrawal of about 20,000 troops by July.

But Bush also made clear his view that the United States would require a major involvement in Iraq for years to come and said the Baghdad government needed "an enduring relationship with America."

There is a need to avoid a moral hazard. Obama can do so by specifying publically exactly what he expects from the Afghans. He has not done so effectively.

actually, the surge plan was developed by people far from iraq; people like ret. gen jack keane. bush actually overruled his own CJCS, whom are informed by the people on the ground. the iraqi surge was pushed by the white house, advised by keane and petraeus, with input from the NSC.

so by the same measure, was bush's decision-making process a poor one by not accepting the wisdom offered to him by the troops on the ground?

There are multiple versions of this story and various people get credited. However, some aspects of the strategies were in place in some regions of Iraq before the Surge was planned, and Keane and others drew on that experience. I'm guessing that other aspects, such as the highly effective covert activities, were likely also developed by people on the ground in the sense that they are close to the operational details.

Without that operational experience from folks on the ground, there would have only been a surge in troop numbers without necessarily better effects.

Bush and co deserve credit for picking the right solutions and the right people, and ignoring bad advice from the Joint Chiefs, the Iraqi Study Group and others, but the solutions were developed by people much closer to the action.

i would argue both bush and obama did what CINCs are supposed to do: question the wisdom when things are going wrong, set appropriate war aims (again, same with bush; his explained war aims of 2008 were certainly different from the aims of, say, late 2003), and order a general review of strategy.

What you are describing is a "C" grade CINC, and I wood agree that Obama is a "C" grade president.

Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, I think Obama is much worse than a C on lots of other issues.

Originally Posted by astralis

anyway, keith, when you get the chance give me a call or send an e-mail over; lots of stuff we can't discuss here, unfortunately.

No foolin', huh? This place is full-on WIRED, man. Our Wink King is here for the next few days, and with him comes...stuff.

I'm exhausted. Don't mind me. This day was tough, tomorrow will be worse, and my guys that have to work the weekend will be without top cover.

I feel an ulcer coming on... :(

citanon,

From first paragraph of the story you linked:

indeed. so, may i ask, where did the idea of a timeline arise during the obama strategy review? hint: not the white house.

There is a need to avoid a moral hazard. Obama can do so by specifying publically exactly what he expects from the Afghans. He has not done so effectively.

i would say not. almost every senior figure in the administration, including those in the DoD, have made the trip to karzai's dream palace and told him in various ways to clean up his act. in just about every public annoucement, we hear over and over that the US expects the afghans to clean up their corruption, stop throwing out anti-US propaganda, put competent governors in charge. in fact, the US has been saying this since the previous administration.

simply put, karzai knows that the US simply cannot walk away from the conflict, or find a comparable national figure (especially among the pashtuns), which gives him a very amount of leverage.

putting a deadline, vague as it is, is about as much as we can do short of threatening to off the guy...which, as both blues and i can attest, can sometimes seem like a very tempting thing to suggest.

There are multiple versions of this story and various people get credited. However, some aspects of the strategies were in place in some regions of Iraq before the Surge was planned, and Keane and others drew on that experience. I'm guessing that other aspects, such as the highly effective covert activities, were likely also developed by people on the ground in the sense that they are close to the operational details.

Without that operational experience from folks on the ground, there would have only been a surge in troop numbers without necessarily better effects.

Bush and co deserve credit for picking the right solutions and the right people, and ignoring bad advice from the Joint Chiefs, the Iraqi Study Group and others, but the solutions were developed by people much closer to the action.

obviously no president makes his decisions in a vacuum, unless said president is possibly LBJ

but it's clear from the written record on the subject that an important part of the bush review was knowing when to listen to the troops on the ground...and when not to. had we followed the conventional wisdom offered by a good portion of the commanders in 2006, then we would have withdrawn. bush's strategy review instead drew on a wide variety of opinions-- much like the obama review.

What you are describing is a "C" grade CINC, and I wood agree that Obama is a "C" grade president.

well, i expect we'll be able to judge better by the 2011/2012 timeframe. the funny thing is that such a statement was also quite applicable to bush; i suspect that now with our goals in iraq mostly achieved, he would get a different grade than he would, say, in mid-2006.

keith,

No foolin', huh? This place is full-on WIRED, man. Our Wink King is here for the next few days, and with him comes...stuff.

I'm exhausted. Don't mind me. This day was tough, tomorrow will be worse, and my guys that have to work the weekend will be without top cover.

I feel an ulcer coming on...

dude, go to sleep. i thought things were getting BETTER at your place, not worse!

The United States (and actually, the World in general), is very fortunate to have a thinker of the stature of Victor Davis Hanson.

Now, if astralis says that he's wrong about the China issue, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, since I know next to nothing about the Far East.

But I do know a bit about the Middle East, and the ME trouble dwarfs any other Geopolitical trouble the West might have. And I think the resulting struggle is going to go on for the rest of my life.

I agree with Hanson so much in everything he writes or says about the ME, that it is almost miraculous.

This article, which incidentally runs counter to the view of very many in this forum, was published a day after the article Bluesman posted.
I think it is pure gold, and one of the many implications that can be inferred has to do with the provincialism of the Left. Indeed, in these days the Left, Obama included, are self appointed cosmopolitans, and this is a myth - I totally reject the idea that the Obama Administration understands better 'the Muslim World' (itself, a highly equivocal expression) than the Bush Administration did.

Beating the Dead Terrorist Horse
September 11 taught us many lessons. To our peril, we have forgotten them.

By Victor Davis Hanson



Most of the current acrimony over counterterrorism is stale. The debate is simply a rehash of issues that were discussed and, in fact, resolved early last decade.

Let us review them one more time.

MOST TERRORISTS ARE NOT POOR AND DOWNTRODDEN

September 11 taught us that a Mohammed Atta or a Khalid Sheikh Mohammed does not commit mass murder out of hunger, want, illiteracy, or Western oppression.

No doubt Middle Eastern poverty contributes to religious violence. But the poor in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Yemen are no more impoverished than those in the slums of São Paulo, Mexico City, Ho Chi Minh City, or Johannesburg. And the latter, despite their frequent claims against the West, do not feel a need to murder in mass in the name of their particular religion.

A Major Nidal Hasan or an Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab wishes to kill Westerners not because he is poor or even on behalf of the poor, but rather out of a warped sense of pride, hurt, and anger.

Such passions derive from a radical religious creed that insists that comparative failure in the modern Middle East is not self-induced — much less a product of fundamentalism, anti-Enlightenment thinking, autocracy, gender apartheid, tribalism, corruption, and statism. Instead the fact that there is no longer an intercontinental caliphate of rich and powerful believers is due to some sort of contemporary Jewish or Western oppression.

The wealthier, better educated, and more Westernized the radical Muslim, often the greater the sense of shame, alienation, and anger that he and his religion are not shown proper deference. We knew all that in 2001, but have apparently forgotten it during eight years of relative calm.

Hasan hated American soldiers not because our system had discriminated against him, much less because of “secondary post-traumatic-stress syndrome,” or any of the other wacky excuses that followed his crime. Instead, in part he sensed that the American military had bent over backwards for him and accommodated his extremism — and was therefore, in his own distorted worldview, weak, decadent, and deserving of what he would dish out.

THERAPY IS NO ANSWER

Radical Islam’s anger is irrational. It is not predicated on the degree of outreach shown by the United States. A contrite and compliant Jimmy Carter, after all, prompted the creation of the slur “The Great Satan.” The year 2009 saw the greatest number of foiled terrorist plots against America since 9/11. Indeed, one-third of all such attempts in the last eight years happened last year — the time of the Obama Al Arabiya interview, the Cairo speech, the bowing to Saudi royals, the promises to close Guantanamo Bay, and the ritual trashing of the Bush anti-terrorism policies.

We need not be gratuitously rude. There surely is a role for sober diplomacy and soft speech. But the degree to which radical Islam will be aggressive toward the West hinges a lot on what it imagines will be our reaction — in terms both of military responses, and of the sense of confidence we project about our own civilization.

Islamists, after all, ignore past American help to, and support for, Islamic peoples in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Indonesia, Iraq, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Somalia — only to pay far more deference to the Chinese and Russians, who have systematically oppressed and often butchered fellow Muslims. Apparently, Dr. Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden would rather recommend reading by Noam Chomsky and Jimmy Carter than offend Vladimir Putin and earn another Grozny.


The popularity of bin Laden and the tactic of suicide bombing itself plummeted throughout the Middle East between 2001 and 2009. And that was not because of the mellifluousness of George Bush’s Texas twang or a sudden love for our policy in Iraq.

Rather, the change of heart developed because bin Laden and his epigones were considered to be losing in Afghanistan and Iraq. They were endangering those who supported them, and murderously turning on their own — even as the United States was projecting both an image of confidence and readiness to extend support for consensual government and personal freedom.

In contrast, the current policy of apology and kowtow — coupled with a cynical realism (albeit cloaked in nonjudgmental, multicultural relativism) and presented abroad with a sense of hesitation and self-doubt — is, in fact, a prescription for reviving radical Islam.

That lesson likewise was apparent after 9/11.

A PROJECTION OF WEAKNESS IS DANGEROUS

Much of radical Islam’s posture is predicated on our expected response. When we did nothing during the Iranian hostage crisis, more or less whined after the Marine-barracks bombing, sent a few cruise missiles after the East African embassy attacks, litigated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and forgot the USS Cole, bin Laden concluded that the West was the “weak horse” and pressed on.

To some degree, Afghanistan and Iraq changed that impression, especially the devastating defeat of al-Qaeda in al-Anbar province in 2006–2008. But that costly progress was accompanied by more recrimination against the Bush administration than anger directed at radical Islam.

Equally important, the Western world said very little about the Danish-cartoon threats, the killing of Theo Van Gogh, and various premodern Muslim actions like rioting after the Pope’s Byzantine exegesis and the false stories of Koran burning in Guantanamo. Had Europe and the United States shown a united front on behalf of freedom of expression, rather than a fear of Islamic reaction, such incidents would have been written off as the lunacy they were.

Instead of reacting to perceived Muslim grievances, we should be continually directing questions to Islam: Why are there numerous mosques in the West, but few churches in Islamic countries? Why are Korans freely disseminated in the West, but Bibles not so under Islamic rule? Why do Muslims enjoy more freedom and rights under Western secular law than in their own countries? The aim of such interrogatories is not to score points, but to suggest to radical Muslims that we hold them to the same standards as we hold ourselves.

ISRAEL IS NOT THE PROBLEM

Just because radical Muslims and the Arab Street claim that a Jewish presence on the West Bank is the catalyst for terrorist outrage does not make it so — any more than Hitler’s insistence that Versailles drove him to the invasion of Poland in 1939, or Argentinians’ claims that their problems in the early 1980s originated with the British “occupation” of the Malvinas.

No Germans today are blowing up Poles for the loss of Danzig and East Prussia. Greek Cypriots are not planting IEDs at Turkish embassies to force the return of ancestral homelands. And the world is not concerned about the divided city of Nicosia or Russian occupation of the Kuriles.

No, what privileges the Palestinian question is largely three factors that have nothing to do with disputed ground: the presence of huge amounts of oil on Arab lands, endemic anti-Semitism in the West and at the U.N., and fear of radical Islamic terrorism.

Take those considerations out of the equation, and the West Bank is about as important to the world as a disputed South Ossetia. We forget that there were three Middle Eastern wars well before the so-called occupation of Palestine. Gaza did not become a calm place once the Israelis left.


Should Palestinians cease the violence, welcome investment from elsewhere in the Arab world, and establish a consensual government, one transparent and free of corruption, the West Bank could become like Dubai — and deal with Israel as a responsible neighbor adjudicating a common border. And yet radical Islamic terrorism in general would nevertheless continue with fresh and always mutating grievances.

All that was clear around 2001 — but apparently now ignored.

THE SO-CALLED WAR ON TERROR WAS WORKING

We constantly argue and bicker about what we should be doing rather than showing some appreciation for our past successes. Our country has not experienced another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11. For all the tragedy of Iraq, what was unthinkable in 2006 has now become accepted — a continuing constitutional government and a month of “war” without a single American fatality. The U.S. military is not broken; in fact it has fought brilliantly in both Iraq and Afghanistan. General Petraeus’s surge, unfairly caricatured at the time and now largely forgotten, was a remarkable military and political victory.

There are now proven protocols for dealing with terrorism that work and are not at odds with the Constitution. For all the talk of al-Qaeda’s resilience, it has lost thousands of its top echelon. The regime in Iran is shaky — and shakier still for the continuance of a constitutional system in neighboring Iraq. Europe is shedding its politically correct appeasement of Islam, and several countries have already enacted statutes about Islamic dress and mosques unthinkable in the United States.

“Bush did it” is becoming ironic, and having the unintended consequence of reminding us how well we once defended ourselves — and how risky it is not to appreciate why and how.

WILL WE NEVER LEARN?

In short, soon after September 11 the United States correctly sized up radical Islam, its nature, its aims, and its pseudo-grievances. We may have made mistakes in implementation, and at times in tactics and strategy, but in large part we had contained the threat, and radical Islam was losing its currency.

Apparently we’ve forgotten why that was so, and thus continue to beat the old dead horse in our own self-recrimination.

Beating the Dead Terrorist Horse by Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online

castellano,

In contrast, the current policy of apology and kowtow — coupled with a cynical realism (albeit cloaked in nonjudgmental, multicultural relativism) and presented abroad with a sense of hesitation and self-doubt — is, in fact, a prescription for reviving radical Islam.

That lesson likewise was apparent after 9/11.

the reason why i doubt hansen is simply that according to him, we should see support for radical islam go up in the past year based on "the current policy of apology and kowtow — coupled with a cynical realism"; we haven't. according to all the polling data we have, support for radical islam worldwide continues to fall in 2008 and 2009.

in fact, the achievements he notes, such as zero US fatalities for over a month in iraq, occurred this year. it also ignores the fact that in 2009, we have more US warfighters, better supplied, better trained, and better led-- with more support and fewer restrictions, taking the war to the enemy than we did in the previous years of the fight.

if you look at the attacks carried out lately, ask yourself if they show the same logistics, planning, complexity, and funding necessary to pull off the london bombings, let alone the madrid bombings or 9-11. this is not what would happen if AQ was actually winning and had more public support.

Originally Posted by astralis

in fact, the achievements he notes, such as zero US fatalities for over a month in iraq, occurred this year. it also ignores the fact that in 2009, we have more US warfighters, better supplied, better trained, and better led-- with more support and fewer restrictions, taking the war to the enemy than we did in the previous years of the fight.

if you look at the attacks carried out lately, ask yourself if they show the same logistics, planning, complexity, and funding necessary to pull off the london bombings, let alone the madrid bombings or 9-11. this is not what would happen if AQ was actually winning and had more public support.

But that's not really the point of the article.Hanson argues that a radical change in the US policy is likely to lead to reversal of that trend.
I'll argue that 8 years of experience led to a peak in effectiveness,both regarding the troops and the C2.Very little to do with the change,but more to do with the continuity.

mihais,

Hanson argues that a radical change in the US policy is likely to lead to reversal of that trend.

fair enough, that's a falsifiable hypothesis, albeit one that doesn't isolate for variables. we'll see in four or eight years, then.

I'll argue that 8 years of experience led to a peak in effectiveness,both regarding the troops and the C2.Very little to do with the change,but more to do with the continuity.

given some of the issues discussed here, i don't think we're at the peak of effectiveness just yet. but again, this is falsifiable; if we see an explosion of radical islamism in areas without the US military because of the blunderings of a weak president, then i expect that will be made clear.

if so, i will be in the crowd with you, calling for obama's ouster.

Originally Posted by astralis

castellano,



the reason why i doubt hansen is simply that according to him, we should see support for radical islam go up in the past year based on "the current policy of apology and kowtow — coupled with a cynical realism"; we haven't. according to all the polling data we have, support for radical islam worldwide continues to fall in 2008 and 2009.

The results of policies don't translate immediately in the change of trends on the ground.

So while you could argue that an increase of support for radical Islam as a result of the new policies is only hypothetical, and we shall see, I think is undeniable that the decrease has been mainly the result of the vigorous handling of the War in Iraq, and specifically the devastating defeat of AQ there accomplished by the Bush Administration.

We shall see. I am so totally convinced that Hanson is right in this point. It is hard to prove, but perhaps not impossible.

in fact, the achievements he notes, such as zero US fatalities for over a month in iraq, occurred this year.

But this is the result of the surge, and Obama opposed the surge and thought it would fail.

it also ignores the fact that in 2009, we have more US warfighters, better supplied, better trained, and better led-- with more support and fewer restrictions, taking the war to the enemy than we did in the previous years of the fight.

It has taken time for the US to find the better leaders with the better strategy, as usually happens in War. But it was Bush who finally found the right leaders and the right strategy and believed in them when everyone was against, including inside the Republican party.

If Obama is smart he will simply continue the policies that have been proven to work. And God bless him if he does. But that's precisely why this "Bush did it!" line of argument he sometimes uses is mediocre and unbecoming.

if you look at the attacks carried out lately, ask yourself if they show the same logistics, planning, complexity, and funding necessary to pull off the london bombings, let alone the madrid bombings or 9-11. this is not what would happen if AQ was actually winning and had more public support.

Again, this might well be down to the pounding AQ has taken in the last years, not the result of a recent change in policies.

As a discomforting note, I'll just say that everything indicates that the neglected AQ in the Maghreb looks worse, not better as of late - they are growing ever stronger in the shelter of the Sahel.

Originally Posted by astralis

given some of the issues discussed here, i don't think we're at the peak of effectiveness just yet.

Touche on that.Let's see if we get the time to get there.

Originally Posted by astralis

if so, i will be in the crowd with you, calling for obama's ouster.

It's ''we'' when there are enemies around.It's ''you'' doing whatever you like with your president.It's ''me'' in a far away place paying attention to your actions and adapting to them.

A complementary point to the parochial provincialism in most of the left, has to do with one of the dangers such ignorance entails:

when post-modern, self-righteous, clueless Mr Multiculti meets pre-modern Mr Jihadist, Mr Multiculti is utterly oblivious to the reality he is facing.

But the other guy is watching all this, and he does get Multiculti's number a lot better than viceversa, and crucially, acts accordingly.

Our Sorta, Kinda War on Terror

By Victor Davis Hanson



After Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Great Britain and France sorta, kinda declared war on Germany. The formal declaration of war was real enough, but the allies’ initial responses were laughable.

Two days after Germany started to slaughter the Poles, Britain began conducting “truth raids,” which were to drop 6 million leaflets over Germany. These milk runs were supposedly aimed at “showing” the Germans that Britain someday might be able to bomb them, “enlightening” them about the sins of the then widely popular and victorious Adolf Hitler, and demonstrating the Brits’ desire for peace and quiet rather than another Somme or Verdun.

For much of that autumn of 1939 and the winter of 1940, the enormous French army stayed put — except occasionally to “push” a mile or two into German territory, and then retreat back, all to prove the country’s supposed fighting ability. Somehow during the nine-month-long “phony war,” the pre-Churchillian allies managed to convey a sense of weakness and timidity, while being bellicose sounding enough to offend their enemies.

Hitler, in contrast, smiled and pressed on, invading Denmark and Norway, launching unrestricted submarine attacks, rounding up Jews in the east, bombing Britain, and preparing for a massive invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France.

We are back in a such a sorta, kinda war against radical Islam — whose name we almost never reference. We send more troops into Afghanistan, but only on the condition that we announce deadlines when they will start leaving. We damn the now-successful Iraq War as ill-conceived and not worth the effort, even as we stay in Iraq and consider the present calm and enduring democracy a (quiet) success.

The president has libeled tribunals, renditions, the Patriot Act, Predator attacks, wiretaps, and intercepts as either shredding the Constitution or unfairly persecuting Muslims — only to keep all these protocols intact. Obama loudly promised the whiny Europeans and the angry Islamic world that he would close the supposed gulag at Guantanamo within a year — and then found he could not do without its apparent utility.

Deadlines are a favorite of our president. But does anyone believe that Guantanamo will be closed on January 21? Iran was to desist from its efforts to obtain the bomb before the U.N. summit in New York, and then before the G-20 summit, and then before the face-to-face negotiations in October, and then by the first of the year.

Sometimes we “reach out” to the unhinged Ahmadinejad and ignore his brave opponents who are risking their lives in the streets; at other times, we lecture the theocracy about its bad behavior in sponsoring terror and violating nuclear non-proliferation agreements. We both damn and praise Israel for its “settlements” — appointing its enemies to the Obama administration, while assuring its friends that U.S. policy remains unchanged.

When Mr. Abdulmutallab tried to blow himself up, along with 300 other passengers, Obama’s initial, though belated, reactions were that the terrorist had “allegedly” tried to commit mass murder, and that he was an “isolated extremist,” despite clear ties to Yemeni terrorists. Our Homeland Security head proclaimed that the system had “worked” — for about 24 hours, until she was politely disabused of that lunatic notion. Abdulmutallab was promised a civilian trial, apparently on the grounds that this non-uniformed enemy combatant was caught on American soil — although his intent was instead to float down upon it as human ash.

CIA agents are to be tried for supposedly being too rough on the architect of 9/11, who in turn, despite past bragging about his role in killing 3,000 Americans, will now as another non-uniformed terrorist be given a public trial in New York.

The 19th-century discipline of philology argued that words were the key to understanding the past — if something in the past had existed, there surely was a proper recoverable word for it. And in turn, how a culture used vocabulary was a window into its very values. So when Barack Obama had his administration scrap the Manichean “war on terror” for “overseas contingency operations” aimed against “man-made disasters,” we understood that he had not signed up for a serious effort against radical Islam.

Instead, Obama apparently felt the war was due mostly to misunderstanding and was only exacerbated by President Bush’s crude Texanisms, rather than being due to the multifaceted pathologies of the radical Muslim world.

Obama by his nomenclature, race, and self-referenced unique life experiences would co-opt and confuse the terrorists and their sponsors rather than have to confront them with force in Neanderthal fashion. Indeed, if one were to go back and count the times Obama has trashed his predecessor, and then collate that list with a list of his comparable slurs and slights against radical Islam, one would conclude that our present federal animus is directed against George Bush rather than Dr. Zawahiri and his cohort.

All this is not lost on the enemy.

The problem is that despite all the appeasement rhetoric and the finger-pointing at prior federal officials, we are still sorta, kinda at war. The Nobel peace laureate Obama has ordered far more judge/jury/executioner Predator raids than did “smoke ’em out” Bush. That is, we regret waterboarding self-confessed mass murderers, but not executing suspected terrorists by remote control in Waziristan — along with anyone unfortunate enough to be sitting in the suspected terrorist’s living room. Americans are bravely fighting radical Muslims in Afghanistan, and are on guard in Iraq — while their commander-in-chief promises to leave the former theater, and shows regret for even being in the latter.

Rendition is said to be the product of Dick Cheney’s dark mind, but Barack Obama is now employing that tactic to its fullest extent. And while Obama continued to blow up Muslims in Afghanistan and simultaneously claimed that Bush had gone overboard in his war against terrorists, there were more foiled terrorist plots in his inaugural year of 2009 than during any other year since 2001.

In other words, we are in very dangerous territory. Barack Obama is doing just enough to infuriate our enemies, while at the same time trying to deny that we are in an existential war against them. He has caricatured the notion of victory as archaic and perhaps surreal in our complex postmodern world, as if the enemy agrees. Obama does not seem to understand that while we conduct a seminar on the meaning of victory, the Islamists believe that its antithesis, our defeat, is both very real and achievable.

While Obama offers false historical analogies, apologies for his country, and exaggerated accounts of Muslim achievement, he nevertheless tries to now follow/now deny the hated Bush anti-terrorism protocols and the Bush/Petraeus plans for Afghanistan and Iraq. Nothing is more dangerous in war than fighting an enemy while trying to beg peace from him at the same time. Ask Neville Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier, Lyndon Johnson, or Jimmy Carter.

So, like the British and French in 1939, LBJ in the 1960s, and Jimmy Carter, the Great Satan of 1979, we are sleepwalking through a real war, mixing therapy and tragedy, peace and war, appeasement and violence, outreach and Predators.

Soon the enemy will take our sad measure, reenergize and escalate, and make us choose either to fight or to desist — as we pray that another Churchill or Reagan rides in over the horizon.

Our Sorta, Kinda War on Terror by Victor Davis Hanson on National Review Online