Opinion

Obama’s ‘war’

Is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev an “enemy combatant”? The Obama administration says “No.” Then again, it almost had to.

From the day he ran for president, Barack Obama has advanced two certainties: that military commissions are bad, and that the way his predecessor prosecuted the War on Terror was not just wrong but immoral, unconstitutional and perhaps criminal.

He staffed his White House with people who thought the same. Attorney General Eric Holder launched a criminal investigation against the CIA interrogators. Harold Koh, once State’s legal adviser, worried Bush’s legal structure could “license genocide.” And let’s not forget Obama’s pick for the Office of Legal Counsel at Justice, Dawn Johnsen, a lawyer who called for “outrage” over the supposedly lawless nature of virtually every aspect of Bush war policy.

As these views hardened into policy, we have had incoherence in the face of attack. A man tries to blow up a plane as it is landing over Detroit — and we discover that a new elite interrogation unit designed for such terrorists is not yet in place. An attack on Fort Hood soldiers by an Army major shouting “Allahu Akbar!” is labeled “workplace violence.” Even if we accept the administration’s version of events in the Benghazi killings on 9/11, its first instinct was to blame an anti-Muslim video.

And with the Boston bombing and the apparent foiling of what Canadian authorities yesterday called “an al Qaeda-supported attack” on a passenger train, the White House dances around the obvious: the planned murder of innocent Americans by men inspired by radical Islam.

The Bush administration made its mistakes. But it did recognize something Obama has not: Our legal system was not designed to handle this new threat. So among the Bush goals was to pass on a legal infrastructure that would make it easier for succeeding presidents to defend this nation against attacks.

For years, President Obama has done all he could to de-legitimate these efforts. By now, even some on his own team must recognize that the effect has been to limit Obama’s own options. The disturbing part is that so long as he makes his political point, the president doesn’t seem to care.