John Aloysius Farrell's Notebook:

Obama defends Guantanamo decisions

President Barack Obama stood — literally — beside the Constitution and the Bill of Rights Thursday, and defended his decisions to ban torture and to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Responding to former Vice President Dick Cheney and other conservative critics, the president accused Bush administration officials of acting from "fear rather than foresight" in the days after the 9/11 attacks, with "hasty decisions" that undermined U.S. efforts in the war against Islamic terrorism.

And American efforts in the war against terrorism are now being compromised, Obama warned, by partisan bickering. "Over the last several weeks, we have seen a return of the politicization of these issues," Obama said. "We will be ill-served by … the fear-mongering" that has "more to do with politics than protecting our country."

Speaking at the National Archives, in the great hall that houses America's founding documents, Obama pushed back against conservative critics who have alleged that he's hindered U.S. intelligence agencies, and endangered Americans, by fulfilling his campaign promises to end torture and close down the "Gitmo" detention facility.

The White House has tried to ignore the debate, hoping it would die down and go away. But both the House and the Senate, in the last week, rebuffed Obama on Guantanamo Bay. At the same time, missteps by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have fueled conservative attacks on the issue of "enhanced" interrogation methods.

So Obama did what he often does when his political initiatives stall — he gave a speech. Its long-term effects will say much about his powers of persuasion.

In the short term, the president has already lost a round to his critics, who have succeeded at getting him distracted and defensive.

Even as Obama spoke, Cheney addressed conservatives at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, and kept up the attack. "In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists," the former vice president said, according to a transcript prepared by Fox News.

"People who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about 'values.' Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11 ... they were trying to prevent future killings. From the beginning of the program, there was only one focused and all-important purpose. We sought, and we in fact obtained, specific information on terrorist plans.

"Those are the basic facts on enhanced interrogations. And to call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims. What's more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation methods in the future is unwise in the extreme.

"It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness," Cheney said, "and would make the American people less safe."

Obama, in his speech, defended his two decisions on both idealistic and pragmatic grounds. He did so, in part, by showing how his actions were compelled by court decisions, and supported by Republican candidates like Sen. John McCain and Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal benches.

He inherited "a mess," Obama said. Bush-era officials "trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions" with policies "neither effective nor sustainable."

He has been forced to clean up the mistakes of the past, Obama said, when he'd prefer to focus on the future.

"As commander-in-chief, I see the intelligence," Obama said. Torture techniques "alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America. They risk the lives of our troops by making it less likely that others will surrender to them in battle, and more likely that Americans will be mistreated if they are captured.

"In short, they did not advance our war and counter-terrorism efforts — they undermined them."

But the president also chastised liberal critics, who have also joined in the partisan warfare by pressing for investigations and show trial hearings over the Bush-era practices. His own party is uneasy. Large numbers of Democrats deserted Obama on the recent votes to close Guantanamo, and others opposed his decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan by deploying an additional 21,000 troops. "There are those who make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism," Obama said.

Obama made a typically sophisticated argument, arguing that wars on terror are inherently different, and that the brutal techniques of unbridled warfare can be counter-productive when employed against such groups as Al Qaeda.

Osama bin Laden and his like know they cannot defeat the United States and its allies in a direct confrontation, he said, but seek to have their foes destroy themselves, by adopting panicky, draconian and disgraceful tactics.

"Instead of serving as a tool to counter-terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped Al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause," Obama said. "Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists than it ever detained."

An analysis worth reading

A lot of the giants have retired, died or been furloughed off. But there are still a few newspaper bylines worth looking for in American journalism. Dexter Filkins is one of them.

Filkins is a top war correspondent for The New York Times, known for his reportage from the field. If you have read a good piece on what it is like to be an Army or Marine grunt under fire in Iraq or Afghanistan, it's likely he wrote it.

So when Filkins takes his skills and turns them to analysis — as in this New Republic review of "The Gamble," a new Tom Ricks book on General David Petraeus and the surge — it's wise to find the time to sit down and read it.

Ricks, of course, is a master in his own right — dissecting U.S. military decision-making. And Filkins, though he differs on a few issues, generally gives "The Gamble" good marks.

While doing so, Filkins ranges far and wide in analyzing the U.S. venture in Iraq. As importantly, he applies the lessons learned to Afghanistan — and raises the crucial question of whether the tactics that worked in Iraq are transferable. This is what makes his essay a must-read. His conclusions are sobering.

"The turnaround in Iraq provides an instructive example," Filkins writes. "It may have taken six years and $1 trillion, but in Iraq the Americans built a state. Iraqi police, soldiers, and security forces number about 600,000: a sure sign of a state. That is a mass — something that the insurgents could join.

"In Afghanistan, there is nothing like this. After eight years of neglect, the Afghan state is a weak and pathetic thing. It is not for nothing that President Karzai's nickname is 'the mayor of Kabul.' At the city limits, his writ ends. Across the border, in FATA, there is almost nothing at all. To this end, the Obama administration plans massively to boost economic development aid in Pakistan, and it is planning on doing the same in Afghanistan. Most significantly, the new administration has promised to increase the size of the Afghan army from its current level of 90,000 to some yet-to-be-determined number — probably in the neighborhood of 240,000.

"This is impressive, but the question today in Afghanistan and Pakistan is whether this is really enough. Only 21,000 additional American troops to rebuild Afghanistan? Again, Ricks's book is instructive. When American military officers launched the surge in Iraq, many of them were deeply skeptical about its chances for success. They tried it anyway, and it worked. And so in Afghanistan, too, we are going to try. But we must beware of facile analogies about surges and awakenings. It is a different world in South Asia. The war in Afghanistan is in its eighth year. Every day Pakistan lurches closer to collapse. Obama's proposals may be too late. Failure is always an option."
 

The second 100 days: where minefields await

Here is a cautionary tale, not about President Obama’s first 100 days in office, but about the challenges looming on Day 101.

Back before the Sunni Awakening, when U.S. troops were still the targets of mortar attacks and improvised explosive devices in Iraq, I hitched a ride to Baghdad with the Washington Post’s experienced Middle East correspondent, Anthony Shadid.

There were no commercial flights into Iraq at the time, so we hired a driver and an SUV in Jordan and, literally, raced to the Iraqi capital. We bribed border guards and kept watch for “Ali Babas” — the bandits that operated along the way and could relieve us of our equipment, the SUV, and the fat rolls of $100 bills we carried.

The one thing I did not fret about was the road. The four-lane highway, running through the western Iraq desert, was a marvel of engineering. I asked Anthony: “Why was it so important to Saddam Hussein to build such a great highway to Jordan?”

“It’s the road to Israel,” Shadid replied — the route the Iraqi tanks would take on the day that Saddam attacked the Jews. And so I got another lesson in the madness of the region.

The road runs both ways, of course, and that is the challenge for Obama. If the Israelis decide to bomb Iran’s nuclear power program, their warplanes will need to cross Iraqi air space. Which the United States, right now, controls.

There are roundabout routes through Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and one can’t eliminate the possibility that the Arabs or the Turks might help the Jews attack the Persians. This is, after all, the Middle East. But even then, some level of U.S. help will be required.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the hard-liner who heads the new right-wing Israeli government, is scheduled to arrive in Washington in mid-May. According to recent reports, Netanyahu intends to tell Obama that the U.S. needs to solve Israel’s Iran problem before Israel will cooperate on a regional peace plan that includes a Palestinian state.

The U.S. wants to work the other way, of course: to defuse tension in the region by getting the Israelis and Palestinians to agree on a two-state solution. In a more peaceful and stable Middle East, the reasoning goes, the Iranians will be more cooperative.

Last week, Obama acknowledged that America has been doing a lot of “listening” to the various parties in the region, but that the day is approaching when the U.S. will insist on acts of good faith.

And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, testifying on Capital Hill, warned Jerusalem that, "For Israel to get the kind of strong support it is looking for vis-a-vis Iran, it can’t stay on the sidelines with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts."

So who blinks? Bibi or Barack?

Welcome, Mr. President, to the second hundred days.

King Abdullah at the White House

President Obama welcomed King Abdullah to the White House Tuesday and praised the Jordanian ruler’s “modern approach” to foreign policy. But both agreed that the U.S. peace initiative in the Middle East is off to a slow and rocky start in the wake of the Israeli elections.

“What we want to do is to step back from the abyss; to say, as hard as it is, as difficult as it may be, the prospect for peace still exists,” Obama said.

(Read here how a previous U.S. president's meeting with a Jordanian monarch changed the course of Mideast history).

On Wednesday, Obama renewed his public support in a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, but acknowledged that the idea has lost support and momentum in the region.

“Unfortunately, right now what we’ve seen not just in Israel but within the Palestinian territories, among the Arab states, worldwide, is a profound cynicism about the possibility of any progress being made whatsoever,” he said.

The Jordanian king added: “I couldn’t have said it better."

When answering questions from reporters after the meeting, Obama repeated his standard assertion that the U.S. should look “forward,” and not consume political energy in a divisive investigation of past U.S. interrogation techniques.

But Obama did say that the Justice Department would continue to examine whether any Bush administration policymakers violated the law. And he expressed hope that if Congress decided to investigate past practices, it would create a bipartisan, independent commission, rather than engage in showy congressional hearings.

Obama acknowledged that, with a divided Palestinian leadership and a new Israeli government just taking office, he’s hoping at best for “gestures of good faith” in the Middle East in the near term.

The recent rhetorical attacks by Iranian President Ahmadinejad on Israel don’t fit the bill. Obama called them “appalling and objectionable” and “harmful.”

“More listening needs to be done,” before Israel and its Palestinian and Muslim neighbors can start any real dealing, Obama said. His envoy to the region, George Mitchell, who has already made several “listening” trips to the region, “will continue to listen,” the president said, but he admitted that “at some point, steps have to be taken so that people can see progress on the ground.”

On the upside, the king said there has been “an outstanding response to the president’s outreach to the Muslim Arab world,” which could lead to “a new page” in relations between America and the Muslim world. He promised that he and other leaders in the region would help the U.S. with the “heavy lifting” of the peace process.

Obama eases travel and trade restriction with Cuba

It is no coincidence that President Obama chose to fulfill his campaign promise and ease restrictions on travel and trade with Cuba on the eve of a trip to Mexico and the "Summit of the Americas" this week.

Obama wants to "reach out" not just to the Cuban people, but to "re-engage" with the citizens of the other nations in the hemisphere as well, administration officials said Monday. The rewriting of U.S. policy on Cuba is one way to send such a signal.

"We anticipate that our friends in the region, with whom we've always had a spirited discussion about Cuba, will raise this," said Denis McDonough, the director of strategic communications at the White House National Security Council.

The new guidelines will allow Cuban Americans to make unlimited trips to visit their families in Cuba, lift the limits on the amount of money that can be sent to family members on the island, and permit U.S. firms to sell computers, cell phones and television and radio service to the Cubans.

"We want to increase the flow of information among Cubans, and between Cubans and the outside world," said Dan Restrepo, the senior director for western hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that "this is in no way designed to, or done in a way to quell so-called pressure" from Venezuela and other nations that are pushing to admit Cuba into the Organization of American States, and to otherwise normalize relations between Cuba and its neighbors.

But by easing the travel and trade restrictions for Cuban Americans, Obama will undercut criticism that the United States expects to hear from Cuba's supporters, and will arm America's diplomats and allies with evidence of U.S. openness and receptivity to change.

"The issue is going to be, I think, strongly discussed" among the countries attending the summit, said Peter Deshazo, a foreign policy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Until the Cuban government responds with some liberalizing measures of its own, the United States will maintain its trade embargo and ban on commercial travel to Cuba, Gibbs said.

"The president would like to see greater freedom for the Cuban people….But he's not the only person in the equation," Gibbs said. "There are steps…that the Cuban government can and must take."

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