ABC News Exclusive: National Security Adviser Says President Obama Is Having Greater Success Taking Terrorists Out of Commission Than Bush Did

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/08/abc-news-exclusive-national-security-adviser-says-president-obama-is-having-greater-success-taking-t.html

ABC News Correspondent, Jake Tapper, interviewed National Security Advisor (NSA), James L. Jones. With great admiration and respect, I am not sure I can agree in totality with my former boss on his premises as to why it is believed “Obama is having greater success taking out terrorists”. The National Security Advisor stated, “This type of radical fundamentalism or terrorism is a threat not only to the United States but to the global community,” Jones said. “The world is coming together on this matter now that President Obama has taken the leadership on it and is approaching it in a slightly different way – actually a radically different way – to discuss things with other rulers to enhance the working relationships with law enforcement agencies – both national and international."

Having been on active duty, been on numerous planning and policy development cells and OPTs (operational planning teams), and having conducted exhaustive research completing my Masters Degree writing a thesis on Counter Terror (CT) policy, dealing with and contributing to CT measures and policy, I don’t believe there is fundamentally anything “ radically different” that the practitioners and shapers of CT policy and implementation have been doing since the early days, weeks, and months redirecting US CT policy and our international cooperation measures to better deal with this "new" enemy. The US bolstered considerably its intelligence, CT Special Ops, and law enforcement liaison and interoperability with countries ranging from Australia to Ukraine in the follow years of 911. Many of the “old Europe” countries initially got on board, because of our NATO ties, exercising existing interoperability levels that acted as a good foundation for this new “Global War on Terror”. Yet, the NSA is now claiming that because of Mr. Obama’s actions, the synergy and interaction is so successful, and that is what is leading to our new success.  Mr. Tapper points out that there is no empirical evidence that supports this new claim of “success”, but I will accept it at face value having great respect and personal interaction with the source.

I believe, as was evident in numerous international forums and expressed by the international press during the early parts of the Bush Administration, the loathing, as exacerbated by our own left biased press and pundits, of President Bush politically, and the relentless portrayal of him and his policies as “cowboy” “unilateral”, “reckless”, “without finesse” were the nail that caught the proverbial “nylons” of stepped up and unimpeded cooperation from our so called “allies”.  As General Jones said himself, NATO itself was a political body. It makes decisions by committee, and paralysis by analysis that he coined “NATO-No Action, Talk Only”.   However the mechanisms and desire to cooperate at the actionable level and even by those in the military and military style hierarchies were always there. Even Spain, after their shameful withdrawal of troops in Iraq as a political decision was made by the incoming Spanish government regarding support for the war, recognized from a practical and “real-politick” stand point that terror as exemplified  by radical Jihadist Islamic fundamentalists was perhaps the greatest single threat to civilized society (as do many “old” Europe countries). Yet, as with many of the countries that tacitly or openly disagreed with the Bush Administration, they didn’t like its politics, and resented the Realist view of International Security, instead of the pervasive, yet provably weaker, Wilsonian Internationalist ideology of International Security as illustrated by the UN in the form of “Multilateralism”.  I need not list all the abject failures we have seen over the last several decades that underscore the unmitigated disasters bodies and ideologies wrapped in the feel good politics of UN style approaches to security conducted, or fail to conduct.  

It is my contention that the political and diplomatic hand cuffs have been removed and the law enforcement and security/intelligence apparatuses are now just able to exercise the already existing procedures and implement the operational methods already laid down by the Bush Administration early on. I think it is a little self serving, though not on the NSA’s part, to claim things are bad because of the last administration (economy, unemployment, deficits, Health Care, et al), but anything that is “successful”, well, that is because “we” are so astute and more in tune with our international colleagues and allies. It wasn’t the cocktail parties and diplomatic notes of congratulations the President received over the last 6 months that changed the tone of what is now being claimed as “better working relationships”. If the Obama Administration wants to now claim that our politics are more in vogue with many international partners in the “Operational Contingencies”, that I can agree upon. However, it is a bit of a stretch to claim the journeymen and interoperability issues of CT operations and approaches are some how more enlightened, or somehow the methods and procedures are just “better’ now that the Obama administration is in. For a group of folks that couldn’t agree on what to call the existing wars (No longer The Global War on Terror), I find it incredulous that they would now know how to miraculously spawn a new way of catching and neutralizing our greatest enemies. Not likely.