What's her beef?
It is now roughly five months since President Barack Obama announced a new direction for U.S. counterterrorism strategy.
"America is at a crossroads," Obama said at the National Defense University in May. "We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us."
The president proceeded to set out his post-war vision for the nation — the peace dividend earned for the last 12 years of a complicated, costly and at times tragically misguided counterterrorism policy. The president, as usual, gave a good speech. Where he's weak is on the follow-through, however.
Though five months isn't that long, when it comes to a war that involves killing and indefinitely detaining a vaguely defined enemy, time is of the essence. It's also critical to restoring U.S. credibility around the globe, particularly around the constitutional principles the president repeatedly emphasized.
The man gave a lovely speech. That's what you elected. You want actual governance and leadership? Rube.
Besides, what is vaguely defined about our Islamist terrorist enemies? It's only unclear when people refuse to name the enemy. Sure, there are reasons to be polite since we need the non-Islamist Moslems to ultimately defeat the jihadis and Islamist ideology. But any vagueness is a diplomatic fiction on our part. Nobody should be confused about that as this author is.
And if we indefinitely detain enemies, that's their fault for waging war on us indefinitely. If they stop, we can too. With all this "war receding" crap we hear from our leadership, I worry that we'll try to go first. And of course, clueless authors can take that speech about this war receding because "all wars end" (Good God, at that point we seriously formulated our foreign policy at bumper sticker depth) at face value and wonder why we kill very specific people.
