Obama begins to rewrite the "struggle" against terrorism.

With the first stroke of his presidential pen, Barack Obama began to rewrite the book on how the U.S. will confront terrorism going forward.

He signed the executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center within a year and shut down secret overseas CIA prisons, a roll back on a national disgrace that had subjected prisoners to years in detention without charge and subjected them to interrogations that human rights groups say is tantamount to torture.  

In making that his first official act as president, he told the world that the United States is going to confront the struggle  against terrorism “in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals.”

And he vowed to prosecute the struggle “vigilantly” and “effectively.”

For Obama, we are in a ”struggle” against terrorism: not a “war on terror,” as Bush has consistently called it. This represents a small shift in terminology, but one that speaks volumes about the approach.

If you try to fight terrorism in a “war” with tanks and troops, you lose. When you define the struggle in purely conventional military terms, it’s over.

It has to be a battle of ideas and street smarts and dogged investigative work and the skill it takes to build up a network of confidential informants. Sometimes a conventional military approach is necessary, but the real struggle for terrorism is a quiet, stealth operation that includes more wire tapping than missile firing.

Obama gets this, Bush didn’t.

Just ask the French or the British, who both saw the failures of the conventional approach and saw what happens when they abandoned their own ideals in the struggle.  So many Israeli counter-terrorism officials I know would agree, but that does not mean that their elected government officials have always seen it the same way.

Certainly, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert doesn’t appear to see it this way given the brutal offensive just undertaken in Gaza. What did it accomplish? Did it serve the purpose of destroying Hamas and undercutting its capability to launch rockets into southern Israel? Time will tell. But most experts in the region don’t think so.

I have covered terrorism for more than 16 years since the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993.  

And in every capital where I have covered terrorism from Belfast to Madrid to London to Jerusalem to Cairo to Paris and beyond there is an understanding that when a country abandons its ideals in the struggle it loses to the terrorists.  It loses because it reduces its own moral standing. It falls into the trap of asymmetrical warfare.

The United Kingdom learned this in its struggle against the IRA and applied its lessons in its very sophisticated investigations and prosecutions in the London underground bombings of July 7, 2005.  

Spain learned this in its long fight against the Basque separatist group ETA and also applied its lessons against those who carried out the Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004.

Did the United States learn this in Iraq — or is it perhaps in the process of the lesson? It is hard to tell right now, but for sure it seems there is now a sharper student of history in the Oval Office.   

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/worldview/090122/obama-begins-rewrite-the-struggle-against-terrorism