Regarding national security, will it be back to the future with Barack Obama?
Obama yesterday huddled with his newly named security team – which included Clinton-era Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and Madeline Albright, plus Clinton’s self-promoting anti-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke.
The appointments seem to underscore Obama’s suggestion Monday that fighting terror is best done via the pre-9/11 method: criminal prosecutions.
Which, as former Mayor Rudy Giuliani rightly notes, is “a belief that underscores [Obama’s] fundamental lack of judgment regarding our national security.”
Think of it as John Kerry Lite.
Kerry, recall, compared terrorism to drug-trafficking and said combating it should be “primarily an intelligence and law-enforcement operation.” (He’s now serving as an Obama surrogate on national-security issues, too.)
Some of those on Obama’s new board of experts called the cops after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
And, apparently, the Illinois senator still thinks that was the right move. “We were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial,” Obama told ABC. “They are currently in US prisons, incapacitated.”
Of course, while those terrorists were “incapacitated,” their friends and allies perpetrated the 1998 US embassy bombings in Africa; two bombings that killed US servicemen in Saudi Arabia and the 2000 attack on USS Cole.
Plus, of course, 9/11.
As Giuliani points out, the law-enforcement approach reflected the Clinton administration’s lack of awareness of “the full dimension of what we were involved in” – that being that America already was at war, but failed to realize it.
Now Barack Obama, who promises a “new” kind of governance, wants to go back to the failed policies of the past.
Advised by people like Warren Christopher and Madeline Albright. (Richard Clarke, at least, counseled strong action against al Qaeda.)
Given his inexperience on national security, it’s pretty obvious that Obama needs advice from experts.
But couldn’t he find some not mired in a Sept. 10 mindset?