Not Guided By Fear

Since the near-miss attack on the airplane over Detroit, the difference between George W. Bush and Barack Obama has been clearly delineated. Initially, it took what seemed like an eternity for George W. Bush to put down the book, “My Pet Goat,” from which he had been reading to school children on that morning of September 11, 2001, after one of his aids whispered to him the nation had just been attacked.

After seven long minutes of shock, however, it was full speed ahead from that point onward: Dead or alive! With us or against us! War on terror! War on Iraq! Torture! Guantanamo! Tough words, tough deeds, no second thoughts.

Obama came on with other slogans. The new president wanted to show that there were no contradictions between defending against national threats and embracing America’s values. He rejected torture, announced his intention to close that stain on America’s reputation called Guantanamo and extended a friendly hand to the Muslim world.

Members of the political opposition in the United States sneered that such an approach was naïve and dangerous. “He won’t admit that we’re at war,” Dick Cheney scolded, because the new administration did away with that nonsense misnomer, “the war on terror.”

But Obama did talk of war, and he did so from his very first day in office. In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in December, he gave an address on just wars. The key phrase in that speech was, “Evil does exist in the world.” While that may have sounded very Bush-like, Obama didn’t use it to justify waging indiscriminate war. He identified the enemy as al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden’s terror network.

The difference is more than simply semantic, even if 30,000 more American soldiers will go to Afghanistan and U.S. drones continue killing innocent civilians from Yemen to Pakistan: Obama’s war against al-Qaida is not the same as Bush’s amorphous “global war on terror.”

The difference is also apparent since Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate his underwear as he neared Detroit on December 25th. It’s certain that George W. Bush would not have remained silent for three days after the attempt, as Obama did. Possibly, the American public would have preferred getting macho rhetoric instead of a government that, at least in the early days following the attempt, appeared to want to downplay the incident.

But a knee-jerk reaction wouldn’t have meant better security. The American intelligence apparatus suffered another painful failure, but that failure exposed the failed reforms and twisted priorities of the Bush era. Obama correctly pointed out that the U.S. had gotten sufficient information to successfully stop the attack, but failed to arrange the pieces of the puzzle correctly.

Basically, Obama reacted properly as one who escapes harm by pure luck should: He called for analysis of the mistakes, testing of current procedures and more stringent controls. One may ask why passengers have to undergo bodily searches if they are from 14 specific countries, 13 of which are Muslim nations.

Or why transferring Guantanamo prisoners to Yemen has been halted, when even the U.S. justice system orders their release. But no one can accuse Obama of committing acts of blind revenge. Unlike Bush, this president doesn’t use fear as a policy.