I have now collected nearly a half dozen comments saying, in effect, that President Obama has called off the "war on terror." I'm sure I could have collected many, many more such statements if I read more widely. The most noteworthy of these comments was one by Dana Priest, a highly regarded journalist, and Priest was referring, of course, to the fact that with the stroke of a pen during his first week in office the President reversed a whole raft of legal interpretations related to the state of war, notably policy concerning the treatment and status of detainees, made during the Bush Administration. 

This is true, of course, the President did do that. I am not qualified to judge that subject this way or that, not myself being a lawyer. Others are busy doing it--fine. But the concept of a "war" on terrorism is not limited to legal issues. This is a complicated matter, with legal, political-strategic and psychological elements that don't neatly overlap. (You remember, perhaps, from before, one of the definitions of a temperamental conservative? Well, here is an example of that way of thinking in action.) I am at a loss to understand how anyone can say that Obama has called off the war on terror in the face of what he has said and done in that regard. 

Let me remind you, if I may, that in his Inaugural address the President said the following: "Our nation is at war against a fair-reaching network of violence and hatred." How does his use of the word "war" square with a judgment that he has called off the war?! Does anyone suppose that he and his speechwriter just made a brain fart? (No, folks, at that level brain farts don't make it through into the final draft.) How does the idea that Obama has called off the war square with his authorization of deadly (and apparently effective) drone strikes into Pakistan, for example?

Maybe he should not have said "war" in his Inaugural, however. Here is why.

Calling the terrorism problem a war from the start, after 9/11/2001, was, in my view, justified and sensible, and not only or even mainly because of the legal flexibility it gave the President as Commander-in-Chief. It had to do with an appreciation for how the Clinton Administration's legalist approach backfired crucially. As some of you may know, the U.S. government has a chance to intercept Osama bin-Laden's plane en route from Khartoum to Kabul in 1996, and declined to go after him for fear that we would be unable to convict him in a court without revealing classified information. We all know what that kind of thinking led to, and Bush Administration principals were determined not to repeat that generic error. 

That does not justify the stupidity of stepping in the classic terrorist trap--of getting the target of terrorism to be untrue to his own principles. And we have certainly stepped in it, having mis- and overreacted badly to the threat. I, for one, don't think the Patriot Act went too far, but honest people can disagree about that. (Most liberals, however, don't share that assessment: They think anyone who disagrees with them is evil, although in most other non-political contexts--religious ones, for example--they will deny the existence of evil. But never mind......) I do think that a lot of the other things we've done have gone too far and have harmed us strategically. (I have written about this: "Comte's Caveat: How We Misunderstand Terrorism", Orbis (Summer 2008). 

Anyway, back to the point: While it made sense to use the "war" concept after 9/11/2001, to mobilize the consciousness of the American people and to shatter the legalist mindset of the past, it pretty soon became problematic, for several reasons. 

It became problematic because Vice-President Cheney and his aide, David Addington, used the legal implications of "war" to lard on their minority view of what Executive power entailed. That is largely what the President reversed--he de-larded the law as understood, interpreted and hence practiced. 

It was also problematic because it didn't align with what most of our closest allies thought was going on, and so over time hindered coooperation. 

It is also problematic because it debases the meaning of war. Very few Americans outside of the armed services have had to sacrifice anything in this "war." It hasn't felt like wartime to most of us, even with the protracted campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to its eternal shame, the Bush Administration never asked the American people to sacrifice for the common good. President Bush told us to go shopping. There probably will be a real war somewhere in America's future, sad to say. When it happens, the silliness of having called the 2002-09 period "wartime" will come vividly clear.

It was problematic, too, because of the amorphous and open-ended nature of the struggle against jihadi violence. The Alien and Sedition Act, what Lincoln did with civil liberties during the Civil War, what Wilson did with them during World War I, what FDR did with the Japanese internment during World War II, were ugly, but they were temporary because the problems that gave rise to them had a clear-cut end. This "war" isn't likely ever to have that kind of end, so the legal and psychological problems that are not severe from the outset might grow more severe over time.  

In short, I think it's too soon to say that Obama has called off anything. So far he has thought and acted on this issue like the lawyer he is.  We will see if he comes to understand the complexities of the matter well enough to think and act like a statesman. Time will tell.

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