Good hit: Master terrorist Anwar Al-Awlaki, a US citizen killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen in 2011, is an example of the good the attacks do. (AFP/Getty Images)
Amid catcalls from a Leftist heckler too blitheringly stupid to understand her dream was coming true, President Obama yesterday declared his intention to end the War on Terror — not quite 12 years since the 9/11 attacks.
In what may have been the most important speech of his presidency, Obama said he would ask Congress to join him in efforts to “refine, and ultimately repeal,” the Authorization to Use Military Force passed three days after 9/11.
In other words, he intends to write the War on Terror out of US law. “This war, like all wars, must end,” he said. “That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”
Does it now? At the start of the speech, the president referred approvingly to the results of the “twilight struggle” that was the Cold War. The Cold War lasted more than 40 years. The key lesson to be learned from that “twilight struggle” — that perseverance against a foe of freedom and capitalism can result in the enemy’s collapse from within — appears to have been lost on him.
To be fair to Obama, he sought to make the case that he can close out the war because he has won it. “The Afghan war is coming to an end,” he said. “Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self . . . [and] in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States.”
Nice words, but of course they come after last year’s happy talk about al Qaeda being on the ropes. That happy talk, which was designed to win the president re-election points, was quickly followed by an al Qaeda affiliate’s assault on the US outpost in Benghazi and the first killing of an American ambassador in decades.
The president and his people sought consciously to downplay that fact in the immediate aftermath of the attack, as we now know. Now they want to sell us the same carpet again.
Note also Obama’s mention of the Afghan war’s ending as a justification for bringing the War on Terror to a close. That, too, is a choice he has made by himself.
Our mission in Afghanistan is concluding as the result of a unilateral decision by the president, and we have absolutely no idea what the consequences of that decision are going to be. One thing is for sure, though — unless things change markedly there, we certainly aren’t going to be able to declare anything like victory as we get out.
The meatiest and most interesting sections of this provocative speech had to do with the use of unmanned, remotely piloted drones as a terror-fighting tool. Here Obama made a powerful case that drones are legal, effective and moral — moral because they limit the numbers of deaths in a way conventional military action can’t and spare the lives of both civilians and American military personnel.
As Kenneth Anderson says in his definitive article, “The Case for Drones” (now available at commentarymagazine.com), “The drone represents a steady advance in precision that has cut zeroes off collateral-damage figures.”
But this highlights a logical contradiction at the core of the speech. In the end, the use of drones as an anti-terror tool is only legal because of the Authorization to Use Military Force — the very thing Obama wants repealed.
That doesn’t make sense.
Indeed, in the end, this nearly 7,000-word speech failed to achieve the balance he wanted between Obama the 2008 Dove and Obama the 2012 Hawk. He can’t write the War on Terror out of existence while reserving to himself the right to go on fighting terrorists with the tools he is only permitted to use because that war exists.