Author: Charles Krauthammer
Publication: Jewish World Review
Date: January 1, 2010
URL: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer010110.php3
Janet Napolitano - former Arizona governor,
now overmatched secretary of homeland security - will forever be remembered
for having said of the attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit: "The
system worked." The attacker's concerned father had warned U.S. authorities
about his son's jihadist tendencies. The would-be bomber paid cash and checked
no luggage on a transoceanic flight. He was nonetheless allowed to fly, and
would have killed 288 people in the air alone, save for a faulty detonator
and quick actions by a few passengers.
Heck of a job, Brownie.
The reason the country is uneasy about the
Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not
just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President
Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist
threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism "man-caused
disasters." Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11
counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will
face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian
trial in New York - a trifecta of political correctness and image management.
And just to make sure even the dimmest understand,
Obama banishes the term "war on terror." It's over - that is, if
it ever existed.
Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately,
al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term "asymmetric warfare."
And produces linguistic - and logical - oddities
that littered Obama's public pronouncements following the Christmas Day attack.
In his first statement, Obama referred to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as "an
isolated extremist." This is the same president who, after the Fort Hood,
Tex., shooting, warned us "against jumping to conclusions" - code
for daring to associate the mass murder there with Nidal Hasan's Islamist
ideology. Yet, with Abdulmutallab, Obama jumped immediately to the conclusion,
against all existing evidence, that the would-be bomber acted alone.
More jarring still were Obama's references
to the terrorist as a "suspect" who "allegedly tried to ignite
an explosive device." You can hear the echo of FDR: "Yesterday,
December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - Japanese naval and air
force suspects allegedly bombed Pearl Harbor."
Obama reassured the nation that this "suspect"
had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured
an enemy combatant - an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform,
direct attack on civilians - and now to prevent future attacks, he is being
interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.
Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some
Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point - surprise!
- he stops talking.
This absurdity renders hollow Obama's declaration
that "we will not rest until we find all who were involved." Once
we've given Abdulmutallab the right to remain silent, we have gratuitously
forfeited our right to find out from him precisely who else was involved,
namely those who trained, instructed, armed and sent him.
This is all quite mad even in Obama's terms.
He sends 30,000 troops to fight terror overseas, yet if any terrorists come
to attack us here, they are magically transformed from enemy into defendant.
The logic is perverse. If we find Abdulmutallab
in an al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen, where he is merely preparing for a
terror attack, we snuff him out with a Predator - no judge, no jury, no qualms.
But if we catch him in the United States in the very act of mass murder, he
instantly acquires protection not just from execution by drone but even from
interrogation.
The president said that this incident highlights
"the nature of those who threaten our homeland." But the president
is constantly denying the nature of those who threaten our homeland. On Tuesday,
he referred five times to Abdulmutallab (and his terrorist ilk) as "extremist[s]."
A man who shoots abortion doctors is an extremist.
An eco-fanatic who torches logging sites is an extremist. Abdulmutallab is
not one of these. He is a jihadist. And unlike the guys who shoot abortion
doctors, jihadists have cells all over the world; they blow up trains in London,
nightclubs in Bali and airplanes over Detroit (if they can); and are openly
pledged to war on America.
Any government can through laxity let someone
slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are
at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy - jihadist is a word banished
from the Obama lexicon - turns laxity into a governing philosophy.
