Terrorism

Sunday was another tragic day in Iraq, more than 150 people were killed and another 500 injured in attacks on the Ministries of Justice and Interior in Baghdad. The devastation was another sad reminder of how fragile are the gains bought so dearly by Iraqis and Americans -- military and civilian -- working every day in that country to consolidate progress toward a secure and representative Iraq.

Those who believe Iraq was "the wrong war," or that violence and authoritarianism are endemic in a country with such deep sectarian divisions, or those who practice the soft bigotry of low expectations (as President Bush so nicely phrased it in a different context), and believe Muslims incapable of democracy will likely see these attacks as justification for accelerating our disengagement from Iraq. Such a conclusion is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the domestic politics of Iraq in the run up to their January provincial elections.

War is the extension of politics by other means, as Clausewitz teaches, and domestic politics is what these attacks were about. Iraqi security forces are struggling to prevent such attacks. Prime Minister Maliki's confidence in their ability has always run ahead of their actual performance (as early as 2005 he advocated a security hand over) and he has been party to politicizing their ranks. 

But Maliki is running on a platform of providing security and negotiating the U.S. withdrawal. Anything that calls security into question or precipitates a return by American military forces into Iraq's cities (from which we had withdrawn on June 30 in accordance with the Strategic Framework Agreement) hurts Maliki's claim. And it doesn't just hurt Maliki, it hurts other incumbent politicians, like the Mayor of Baghdad, who also argued for removing blast walls to facilitate movement and commerce and a return to normalcy in the capital.

After the last spectacular attack, against the Foreign Ministry on Aug. 19, Prime Minister Maliki responded in a stridently partisan fashion, blaming Sunni and al Qaeda as one, conducting arrests and crackdowns that have a suspicious political tilt against his political opponents. While the U.S. military spokesman tried to put a good face on the Iraqi government's reaction, comparing it to the crasser political manipulation of the Aug. 19 bombings, Maliki's statement in the aftermath speaks for itself:

The cowardly acts of terrorism which occurred today must not weaken the resolution of Iraqis to continue their journey and to fight the followers of the fallen regime, the Baathists and al-Qaeda."

This, before the government had any reasonable idea of who conducted the attacks. There are numerous political factions that could benefit from delegitimizing the Maliki government's record, not least rival Shi'ia who excluded him from being their standard bearer in the election.

But the good news is that political pluralism has taken root in Iraqi politics. Maliki couldn't win the support of a Shi'ia-only slate organizing for the January elections, so he opted to build a cross-sectarian slate. He's not trying very hard, mind you, as his statement blaming Sunni for Sunday's bombing shows. But his effort to appeal across sectarian lines was his Hail Mary (so to speak) and shows he believed voters would reward the choice. Vice President Tariq al Hashimi, a Sunni, is likewise tacking beyond sectarianism to broaden his prospective political base. 

This is a hugely important development, seldom seen in fragile societies. Usually, as with the Balkan elections of the early 1990s, politicians prey on voters' mistrust and trend toward extremes which is why elections in factional societies are so often polarizing and foster an upward spiral of violence.

In the last provincial elections, nearly all incumbents were voted out of office, a strong signal that average Iraqis believed they weren't doing their jobs. And voters weren't just "simplifying the map," moving to the sectarian extreme out of fear: Shi'ia voted out Shi'ia, Sunni voted out Sunni, Kurd voted out Kurd. What Iraqi political elites took from that election is the fundamental commandment of democracy everywhere: Thou Shalt Respect the Voters.

Talking to Iraqi politicians (as I did the past couple of weeks around their country), what is most striking is the extent to which they sound like small-city politicians in our own country. They worry about power outages and sewer systems and the quality of education for youngsters. They're mad at the central government for not funding activity they consider its responsibility. They rail against corruption -- even as many of them practice it -- and fear exposure by the free media that is burgeoning. Accountability has come to Iraqi politics, and the politicians know it.

A representative government is struggling to emerge in Iraq. It may not succeed in bridging the sectarian tensions, corruption, and long shadow of decades of authoritarianism that inhibits initiative. In Iraq, strong cultural undercurrents cut against the kinds of behavior that make successful democracies successful. But Iraqis want it, and political elites are responding. This is good news for Iraq and for the advancement of our values in the world.

AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Getty Images

By Peter Feaver

Professor Andy Bacevich, a prolific critic of American foreign policy, has proposed an intriguing grand strategy for the conflict formerly called the war on terror: let's approach the war on terror as if it were another Cold War. Since Andy knows first-hand the personal tragedy of these wars -- his son died while serving in the Army in Iraq -- his powerful voice of moral authority garners a respectful audience every time he speaks on the subject.

I am sympathetic to the Cold War frame and offered it as a useful way for thinking about the problem of terrorism almost exactly 8 years ago, as did other commentators -- notably, Eliot Cohen. We thought that the framework was a useful antidote to the pre-9/11 mindset which viewed terrorism narrowly through the lens of law enforcement and thus limited policymakers only to a very restricted set of law enforcement tools. The broader Cold War frame incorporated all of the law enforcement tools, plus additional ones. I don't remember Andy (whom I consider to be a friend and long-time debating partner) being persuaded by our reasoning then; I rather recall him thinking it would lead to what he calls American "militarism." But evidently he has come around to our point of view now.

In so doing, he joins President Bush, who used that frame in his 2006 National Security Strategy and his follow-on National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. The three pillars Andy highlights would all produce emphatic head-nodding from any Bush administration alum. Pursue decapitation, meaning tracking and killing the terrorist leaders? Of course, and the Bush administration dramatically ramped up these efforts. Pursue containment, meaning improving law enforcement, tracking vigorously international financial transactions and weapons transfers?  Absolutely, and the Bush administration was very innovative in these areas. Compete with the jihadis on both a material and an ideological terrain? Again, this was a centerpiece of the Bush administration effort.

Even Andy's eloquent peroration -- "The upshot is that by modifying the way we live -- attending to pressing issues of poverty, injustice, exploitation of women and the global environmental crisis -- we might through our example induce the people of the Islamic world to consider modifying the way they live." -- reads like one of President Bush's speeches. If a Bush speechwriter were penning it, he might throw in a reference or two touting No Child Left Behind, the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, the Malaria Initiative, the efforts in women's education, and the increased funding for renewable energy, all of which (and more) were viewed in much the same way Andy is suggesting here: part of an all-elements-of-national-power comprehensive approach to combating terrorism at both the material and ideological levels.

Now I recognize that many people, chief among them the current administration, would all argue that the Bush administration should have done even more on all of those dimensions. But the strategic pillars Andy recommends did comprise important parts of the Bush strategy and, on each of these dimensions, the Obama team has been trying to do the same thing, only harder, faster, and better.

Where he departs from what might be considered Bush/Obama orthodoxy is when Andy suggests that we can accomplish all of this even better if only we would abandon the fight in Afghanistan and also in Iraq (the Iraq point is implicit in his most recent articulation, but explicit elsewhere in Andy's writings). That is the novel bit of his proposal: the notion that the Cold War frame works better if only we would get out of Afghanistan (and Iraq). That was not President Bush's view and, so far at least with respect to Afghanistan, that is not what President Obama has embraced.

Nor does it follow inexorably from the Cold War frame. One can view the larger conflict as a Cold War, and still believe it is essential to prevail in theater combat in Afghanistan. One can even argue, as McChrystal, Petraeus, Bush, and Obama have, that prevailing in Afghanistan is an important -- Obama used to call it a necessary -- step in prevailing in that larger contest. Andy's new spin on grand strategy is in promising that we have a better shot at winning the larger contest if only we embrace the inevitability of defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the sooner the better.

It is a very enticing vision, but it rests on some hazy premises. Yes, we would prefer to be able to whack the terrorists from afar and do so in a fashion in which no civilians die. But who will give us the pin-point intelligence (and so much more of it than we are getting now), after we have abandoned our erstwhile allies in Afghanistan and Iraq? How often will the terrorist leaders we are hunting show up within range of assault helicopters away from civilian population centers, thus allowing us to do the Delta Force strikes Andy favors rather than the Predator strikes we have increasingly relied upon?  How can we be sure that our departure will encourage the Muslim world to see the terrorists as offering only a "retrograde version of Islam" and not, in fact, as the "stronger horse" that has defeated its second great superpower?

As long as one elides over these tough questions, one can stay focused on this promise that we can have it all and for less sacrifice, more gain for less pain, more security for less security operations. Such a vision is far more enticing than McChrystal's somber and stark catalogue of the costs entailed in pursuing success, or the similarly painstaking evaluation of the alternatives that leaves Steve Biddle endorsing a surge in Afghanistan.

Indeed, Andy's message is so enticing, I would be surprised if we don't hear this chorus growing. The question is: Will President Obama join it?

By Kori Schake

Skepticism grows in President Obama's party about his presumed endorsement of General Stanley McChrystal's assessment of the strategy and resources required to succeed in Afghanistan. Senate Armed Services Chair Carl Levin has expressed skepticism about sending more forces until the Afghans contribute more themselves. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doubts there will be public support. Lynn Woolsey, Chairman of the Progressive Caucus, is threatening to lead opposition to funding the President's wars.

I believe Obama will not continue on the trajectory he set out for redoubling our efforts to win the "good war" in Afghanistan. He and his advisors lacked -- and continue to lack -- understanding of the importance of succeeding in Iraq, or why the surge strategy and additional forces changed the political dynamic in that country. His priorities are domestic, and he even encouraged trade-offs between international security and domestic policy by suggesting that his health care plan was affordable because (by his accounting) it would cost less than the wars we are fighting.

So I suspect that over the course of the next 9 months, the administration will conclude that: (a) the sticker price for achieving its aims in Afghanistan is too high; (b) international partners are exhausted with this effort; and (c) Afghans aren't providing the indigenous partnership that our strategy relies on to be successful. I don't share these views, but reasonable people who mean our country well could conclude them.

The only wrong choice -- both morally and strategically -- would be for the President to continue sending our country's sons and daughters to war if he is unwilling to commit the resources and effort to win it. That would be the true and tragic Vietnam parallel.

American power is pervasive and diverse enough to protect our interests without winning all our wars, as Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia demonstrate. But if the President winds down our effort to construct an Afghanistan that will not be a breeding ground for terrorist attacks, what are the policy alternatives for keeping Americans safe from terrorism?

The first is better defense: pushing out the perimeter of our defense against attack and building in layers of defense (inspecting cargo at ports of embarkation, checking flight manifests before planes come into U.S. airspace, tracing money from suspect organizations and individuals, cross-referencing databases in local/state/federal law enforcement and other sources). Much of this is already routine.

The second is relinquishing the concept of holding states accountable for actions occurring in their territory, and either gaining their tacit cooperation or violating their sovereignty to kill or capture people we feel threatened by. This was the approach to terrorism before 9/11. It accepts the world is dangerous and manages consequences rather than causes. However, clandestine operations are the key component of this approach, and the Attorney General's belief that even outside legal opinion does not protect agents could prevent this from being executable.

The third is ceding Afghanistan to squalor but redoubling our partnership with Pakistan. Many in the so-called Muslim world are surprised at our effort in Afghanistan, a society they consider at the far margin of affecting Muslim attitudes. Pakistan is understandably skeptical of American enthusiasm now, given our support for the mujaheddin, use of their intelligence community's relationships, and sanctimonious intrusiveness in their country's affairs. The Obama administration is off to a good start in relations with Pakistan, and could channel assistance for public education programs and other tools to shape a positive future in Pakistan along with our encouragement and assistance in their fight against extremism. A failed Afghanistan could be a containment problem if we had a successful Pakistan.

The fourth is cordoning off places we consider suspect: restricting travel and immigration, considering people suspect by passport rather than action. Of course, this categorical denial diminishes our ability to foster moderation in those societies by closing them off to education, relatives, and experiences that show them a different America than terrorists paint. Moreover, it redoubles the punishment of people unfortunate enough to be born in a society riven by terrorists in their midst.

The fifth, and I believe least damaging, alternative would be for the administration to broaden its scope of cooperation with Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, even Iran and other countries that might be willing to adopt common cause with us for the long and arduous work of building an Afghanistan that would not be a threat to its own people and ours. This would require acknowledging to the Russians our culpability in their failed occupation of Afghanistan, working with them and the Chinese on border control measures they use repressively with their own publics but would help separate the problems of Afghanistan from those of surrounding countries, addressing corruption when it inevitably occurs, and numerous other unpalatable compromises.

But that is the work of coalition warfare. The only difference between that and what we are doing now is that we'd be making the compromises with countries that share fewer of our values and more of our interests in Afghanistan.

By Kori Schake

Assistant to the President John Brennan gave a speech yesterday, ostensibly a landmark address. He assured listeners that "the fight against terrorists and violent extremists has been returned to its right and proper place: no longer defining -- indeed, distorting-our entire national security and foreign policy, but rather serving as a vital part of those larger policies."

It is tempting to lampoon Brennan's remarks for the risible and solipsistic rhetoric (e.g., "like the world itself, [Obama's] views are nuanced, not simplistic; practical, not ideological.") -- or to once again express my concern that the administration might actually believe the refrain that the president "rejects the false choice between ensuring our national security and upholding civil liberties." This seems to be mistaking slogans for solutions, as Edward R. Murrow cautioned against.

But the standard for measuring Brennan's remarks is what they contain that is new policy. With the exception of Guantanamo, which the president has declared he'll close but six months later has not yet provided a program to achieve, the program sounds remarkably like Bush administration practices. Defeat al Qaeda, check. Hold Afghanistan, check. Partnership with Pakistan, check. Sharing intelligence and training militaries in East Africa, check. Going after terrorist financing, check. Disrupting terrorist operations, check. Prevent terrorists from getting nuclear weapons, check. Ensure our military has the troops and the tools it needs, check. Strengthen the intelligence community, check. Defend the homeland, check.

Even in the areas Brennan was claiming radical departures from Bush policies there is striking continuity. Brennan showcased "ending the war in Iraq" as an administration achievement. He somehow forgot to mention the glide path was set by the Bush administration in signing the Statue of Forces Agreement before President Obama was even elected. All Team Obama did was not carry out the president's campaign promise of a faster drawdown.

And in the doubling down on troops in Afghanistan without a political or economic or justice or drug strategy to bring a "whole of government approach" to the problem actually out-Bushes the Bush administration. Former Vice President Cheney would have much more damagingly rebuked Obama's approach to national security by pointing out it is no different from Bush's.

The only actual variance with Bush administration practice I found is rejecting the name "war on terror." There is considerable merit in this approach. Referring to a "war on terror" gives our enemies a validation we should be smart enough to deny them. It offends many who want to support us. Our preoccupation is not shared by other countries that are not the target of al Qaeda.

But it is unfair to the Bush administration to suggest they were not engaged with the Muslim world on issues of importance to those countries and societies. The Bush administration rightly understood the crisis in the so-called "Muslim world" about tolerance and modernity. Brennan says this challenge is "ultimately not a military operation but a political, economic, and social campaign to meet the basic needs and legitimate grievances of ordinary people." Absolutely right. Which is why the Bush administration put so much effort into issues like democracy promotion, poverty alleviation, free trade, security assistance, and disease eradication.

Brennan was not disavowing that we are fighting a war, nor that the enemy has a virulent religious ideology and uses the killing of civilians as a tactic. In fact, he reaffirmed it, quoting President Obama saying "our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred." Brennan himself continues, "and to win this war against al Qaeda, the administration continues to be unrelenting, using every tool in our toolbox and every arrow in our quiver."

So the objective is no different, the full range of tools will continue to be used ... only the name will be different. The fun will start when administration begins looking for some shorthand way to describe what is not the "global war on terror." The best entry into the acronym contest so far comes (not surprisingly) from a witty soldier I know in the military's Special Operations Command: the Joint Interagency Homeland Active Defense, or JIHAD.

Let us hope the Obama administration really is changing so little in their approach to fighting the terrorist threats our country faces, and that they don't believe their own rhetoric about there being no trade-offs between our values and our security. A change in the "war on terror" language is beneficial. But they should not misunderstand that good people are daily making decisions in which they have to make trade-offs between our values and the risks to our society. The Obama administration's own language creates serious problems for these people as they protect the rest of us. As no less an expert on terror than Leon Trotsky tells us, "you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

By Christian Brose

This New Republic profile by Michael Crowley of U.S. Ambassador Dan Fried, the man charged with finding foreign homes for many of the Guantanamo detainees, is worth reading:

Perhaps half the 240 detainees now in custody will have to be relocated to countries other than their native lands because they risk being tortured there (or worse) upon their return. For Fried, that means shuttling endlessly between foreign capitals to plead for help, and often to be met by extortionist demands and haughty lectures from foreign diplomats. It is grueling work, making the respected career diplomat something like a door-to-door salesman peddling the human equivalent of radioactive waste.

But perhaps the hardest part is handling the obstacles that keep cropping up in Washington itself. First, there's the ticking clock of Barack Obama's pledge to shut Guantanamo by January 2010 -- a bold statement that defied the warnings of advisers who said that, if closing Guantanamo were easy, George W. Bush would have made good on his own stated wishes to do so himself. Then, there's the craven opportunism of members of Congress who want to look tough on terrorism by vowing to block any effort to resettle the wrongly detained here in America. "It is a tough job, to put it mildly," says Fried. Or, as one friend simply commented after the latest round of congressional grandstanding against accepting the detainees, "Poor Dan."

Full disclosure: I worked with Dan for four years at the State Department, and at the risk of making his life even more difficult by singing his praises on this blog, I'll say that he is one of the most impressive and talented Foreign Service Officers I encountered. But more than that, he spent the past four years helping to rebuild America's bridges to our European allies, and rather than doing what any normal person his age would have done -- which was retire to make money, or live out his days in peace, or both -- Dan chose instead to take the single most thankless job in government because he's a great American.

As for the ultimate goal of Dan's job, consider this quote from John Bellinger, who worked as much as anyone to solve this problem in recent years:

Ultimately, says Bellinger, the former Bush official, it may be impossible to find homes in humane countries for the vast majority of the men at Guantanamo. As a fallback, the United States might have to repatriate some of the men to their repressive home countries after all -- which would leave Fried the task of winning promises of good treatment from those governments. "Those are some of the toughest negotiations," says Bellinger, "where we say we have to have high-level, ironclad, specific assurances that [detainees] will not be mistreated, but with some kind of monitoring mechanism."

What is dawning on the Obama administration is that, in the moral interest of closing Guantanamo, they'll have to cut some moral corners elsewhere. This is not a new idea, and it's what makes the prison dilemma so hard. Maybe those "assurances" and "monitoring mechanisms" will hold up. But it's very possible they won't, and to some degree the administration will just have to look the other way, or else Guantanamo will be open forever. Other moral corner-cutting might (and likely will) include holding more detainees in Bagram Air Base, or just killing more of them preemptively on the battlefield so as to avoid the whole problem of detention altogether, as Jack Goldsmith suggested this weekend in the Washington Post. There is no easy or morally straightforward answer.

Poor Dan. Poor us.

By Christian Brose

Say what you will about Vice President Cheney's decision to come out swinging so soon after leaving office, or President Obama's decision to launch a preemptive strike against him today, the speech that each man gave this morning was smart, serious, sober, and civil. Here we had one of the hardest national security issues of our time debated head to head in front of the entire country by the two best advocates for their respective sides. It was a fascinating occasion. And yet I am left thinking, now even more than before, that this is an argument that will never end, for two reasons: facts and fear.

One thing that rubbed me the wrong way about Obama's speech was how dismissive he was of fear and the people who rightly felt it (and still do). The decisions made after 9/11, he said, were "based upon fear rather than foresight," as if that alone discredits them. Cheney and others are "fear-mongering" by reminding the voting public that there are people out there who want to kill us, and that Americans differ over how to prevent that from happening. The truth is, fear is a human emotion, and thus an inherently political issue. Obama and company are perfectly willing to play on people's fears when it comes to jobs, or health care, or the environment. People are legitimately afraid for those things, just as they are for their security. And one purpose of policymaking is to assuage those fears.

Everyone was afraid after 9/11, for one good reason: a lack of facts -- about whether more attacks were coming, and if so, how, and when, and from where, and by whom. Uncertainty is the greatest fear of all, and like it or not, in the weeks after 9/11, that was the climate in which new policies had to be made on a host of hard problems for which there were few precedents, legal or historical. Cheney and others contend that those policies worked. They generated facts, and those facts saved lives. And if only Obama would release the CIA memos that supposedly lay out what was learned, the American people could see those facts for themselves and draw their own conclusions about "enhanced" interrogation.

Would that settle things once and for all? Somehow I doubt it. For when it comes to intelligence, facts are strange things.

Cheney himself acknowledged today that some people who have reviewed the CIA memos think they are "inconclusive." Others agree. In time, it's easy to imagine there will be other memos, if there aren't already, that look at the same record of "enhanced" interrogations and the same resulting intelligence and yet draw the opposite conclusion from the CIA, which is after all justifying a CIA program. I'm not sure we will ever be able to say with absolute certainty that one specific "enhanced" interrogation led to the disruption of a specific terrorist plot that definitely would have killed Americans. With any luck, the Senate Intelligence Committee's comprehensive investigation of this issue will reach firm conclusions. But I'm just not sure intelligence works this way, that it's this conclusive. It's like pulling one strand of a tightly knit sweater and saying it is the decisive thread holding the whole thing together. And of course, even if you were able to corroborate that judgment, you still wouldn't be able to prove the negative -- that this piece of intelligence could not have been gained through other, less harsh means.

This is what I mean by an argument without end. For all of the facts we now have, and those that may still emerge, I doubt they will convince the American public decisively to side either with Obama or Cheney. And where there is uncertainty there will continue to be fear. This helps to explain the recent paradoxical findings from a major Gallup poll that a slight majority of Americans believe both that "enhanced" interrogations were justified and that past instances of their use should be investigated for misconduct.

Fear isn't going anywhere. The question is, how best to manage and assuage it while not exploiting it.

I don't fear for America because of the policies Obama laid out today, because I agree with Jack Goldsmith that most of these policies are largely similar in their substance to where the Bush administration ended up, often as a result of shifts in its approach during the second term based on new facts that emerged and new perspectives that were gained. This is the irony of Cheney's current position: Many of the policies he is arguing for now were in recent years rolled back by President Bush himself, or overturned by the Supreme Court. Closing Guantanamo is an exception, but it was Bush's stated goal to do so, and people like Secretary Rice and John Bellinger and Matt Waxman worked tirelessly to do it. Closing it now, though difficult, is both right and necessary. So in all these ways, Cheney's argument is with Bush as much as it is with Obama.

What does make me fearful, though, is the way the White house has handled this entire thing -- deciding to release the Justice Department memos, but saying there would be no prosecutions, but then reversing and saying, actually, there may be some prosecutions after all. Obama said he released those memos because the information they contained was already widely known. Well, that works just as well as an argument for not releasing them, because nothing would be gained by doing so. We already knew that senior Al-Qaeda terrorists had been waterboarded; how many times it was done is just a detail, gory though it is. What the release of those memos did accomplish, though, was to greatly exacerbate the fear on the part of our national security professionals. And here, I think, Cheney gets it right:

[A]t the CIA, operatives are left to wonder if they can depend on the White House or Congress to back them up when the going gets tough. Why should any agency employee take on a difficult assignment when, even though they act lawfully and in good faith, years down the road the press and Congress will treat everything they do with suspicion, outright hostility, and second-guessing?

I would add that this applies to the military as well.

The debate over "enhanced" interrogation, the rule of law, and national security will never end. But I fear the tragedy is just beginning. Before 9/11, America's counter-terrorism policies suffered from excessive caution and risk-aversion. After 9/11, that pendulum swung too far in the other direction, toward what Cheney once called "the dark side." Now that pendulum is swinging right back toward the other extreme again -- not because Obama wants it to, or believes it should, or mandated that it must in his policies, but because of unnecessary actions he took without adequate "foresight," and the manner in which he took them. The professionals entrusted to keep America safe now work in fear of taking the risks that their jobs entail. And the people they're charged with protecting still don't have the facts to reach a political consensus on this issue (and likely never will, even if Cheney were to get his way).

This debate may reduce to a low boil, but it won't go away. And when the next attack comes, as everyone believes it inevitably will, we will be right back in the teeth of this thing. It is a fight without end, and I fear it will only get nastier.

By Philip Zelikow

The two speeches on counterterrorism today by President Obama and former Vice President Cheney were each, in their way, exceptionally well-crafted addresses showcasing each man's rhetorical gifts. The two addresses repay careful study and comparison. But everything I could say to contrast the style and substance of the two speeches can be gleaned from this pair of quotations from them:

Mr. Cheney: 

Behind the overwrought reaction to enhanced interrogations is a broader misconception about the threats that still face our country. You can sense the problem in the emergence of euphemisms that strive to put an imaginary distance between the American people and the terrorist enemy. Apparently using the term 'war' where terrorists are concerned is starting to feel a bit dated. So henceforth we're advised by the administration to think of the fight against terrorists as, quote, 'Overseas contingency operations.'

President Obama: 

After 9/11, we knew that we had entered a new era -- that enemies who did not abide by any law of war would present new challenges to the application of the law; that our government would need new tools to protect the American people, and that these tools would have to allow us to prevent attacks instead of simply prosecuting those who try to carry them out....

Now let me be clear: we are indeed at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates. We do need to update our institutions to deal with this threat. But we must do so with an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process; in checks and balances and accountability.

By Christian Brose

Before tomorrow's battle royale of speechmaking between President Obama and former Vice President Cheney regarding the conflict formerly known as the War on Terror, make sure you first check out Jack Goldsmith's spot-on piece in the New Republic. It's a must-read:

Former Vice President Cheney says that President Obama's reversal of Bush-era terrorism policies endangers American security. The Obama administration, he charges, has "moved to take down a lot of those policies we put in place that kept the nation safe for nearly eight years from a follow-on terrorist attack like 9/11." Many people think Cheney is scare-mongering and owes President Obama his support or at least his silence. But there is a different problem with Cheney's criticisms: his premise that the Obama administration has reversed Bush-era policies is largely wrong. The truth is closer to the opposite: The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric. This does not mean that the Obama changes are unimportant. Packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric, it turns out, are vitally important to the legitimacy of terrorism policies.

Also, over at AEI's great new blog, Danielle Pletka makes a good case for why Obama, despite running the "savviest information ops of any White House in modern history," still has his work cut out for him tomorrow.

This will be very interesting...