Since America lost its nerve long ago, Obama officially renounces War on Terror

Let's just be honest. Democrats never liked the War on Terror. They never really supported it. There were a lot of reasons for this. Some were partisan - they just didn't want to support anything George W. Bush wanted to do. Some were ideological - they really didn't believe we had the right to pursue our enemies, and they just plain didn't want to because they don't like when the U.S. uses force aggressively. Some were strategic - if they backed the idea that we should be doing this sort of thing, they gave tacit approval to the use of funds they would prefer to spend on more Democrat-friendly priorities.

Oh, they "supported" it in the early going, even giving Bush authorization to attack Afghanistan and invade Iraq, not because their hearts were in it but because the political dynamics of the time would murdered them if they had done anything else. As soon as they had an excuse to turn on Bush, they took it, and that came when Iraq became difficult and they were able to make hay out of "human rights abuses" at Gitmo and that sort of thing. The amazing thing, really, is that Obama kept up the charade of being serious about fighting terrorism throughout his entire first term. I guess he figured four years of holding his nose and pretending to take national security seriously was worth it to gain a second term in which he could follow his true instincts. So here we are. Taking the fight to the bad guys was nice while it lasted, but you know as well as I do that America lost its nerve long ago. Someone like Obama could never have been elected otherwise, and yesterday he simply made official that it is now politically safe to come out and say so:

---

For over the last decade, our nation has spent well over a trillion dollars on war, helping to explode our deficits and constraining our ability to nation-build here at home. Our servicemembers and their families have sacrificed far more on our behalf. Nearly 7,000 Americans have made the ultimate sacrifice. Many more have left a part of themselves on the battlefield, or brought the shadows of battle back home. From our use of drones to the detention of terrorist suspects, the decisions that we are making now will define the type of nation — and world — that we leave to our children. So America is at a crossroads. We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us. We have to be mindful of James Madison’s warning that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror. We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society. But what we can do — what we must do — is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger to us, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all the while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend. And to define that strategy, we have to make decisions based not on fear, but on hard-earned wisdom. That begins with understanding the current threat that we face. Today, the core of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on the path to defeat. Their remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us. They did not direct the attacks in Benghazi or Boston. They’ve not carried out a successful attack on our homeland since 9/11.

As James Jay Carafano asserts on National Review Online's Corner today, Obama is peddling a fantasy:

“Our alliances are strong, and so is our standing in the world,” Mr. Obama declared. Nothing could be further from true. In the Middle East, most of America’s friends see us as a nation in decline, uncertain and, increasingly, a power that can’t be depended on. “Today, the core of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on a path to defeat,” he added. That proposition is debatable. And it is certainly irrelevant. Al-Qaeda has dependable allies in the Taliban, Lakshar-e-Taiba, the Haqqani Network, and others of their ilk. They are undermining U.S. interests just as effectively as if bin Laden where still at the helm. Further, the president virtually ignored the resurgence of political Islam that is destabilizing the Middle East. Sometimes it is in league with al-Qaeda, and sometimes it competes with al-Qaeda. Either way, though, it is a development that bodes ill for U.S. interests. But rather than address the forces marshaling against us, Mr. Obama remains myopically focused on the war he wants to fight. He describes this war as “a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”

Let's remember something. Before 9/11, the U.S. had mastered the art of "proportionate" responses to attacks. We would lob a cruise missile. We would take out a target here and there to remind whoever it was that they couldn't kick us without getting kicked back. All this did was show the terrorists they could goad us into a tit-for-tat. It was like they had one of those rubber mallets and had all the access they wanted to our knees. When they killed almost 3,000 people on 9/11/2001, Bush decided it was time to abandon that approach in favor of an ambitious effort to take the fight to the enemy - to find them wherever they were in the world and kill them before they could get to us. It generated no small amount of hand-wringing because it just wasn't the way things had been done up to that point, but the American public supported it at the time because we had just seen the horror of what these people were willing to do to us if they could. It made sense to make 100 percent sure they could not, and the only way to do that was to kill them. Once it was politically safe to do so, the left tried its best to insist we were only inflaming the bad guys - that we just created 30 new terrorists for every one we killed. And after awhile, the public did indeed tire of the war. It got to the point where you couldn't remind people of what happened on 9/11 without being accused of exploiting it for political purposes. It became like abortion photos. The left didn't want you to see it because it might stir your emotions when they were just about getting you to the point where you were finally sick of the war. The last thing they wanted was for you to watch those people jumping to their deaths from the top of the World Trade Center as the only alternative to being incinerated. And it worked. Bush never lost his nerve, but for the most part, the nation did. In some ways, Bush's success worked against him. The more we did to prevent further attacks, the less urgent it seemed to fight this war. Life was getting back to normal and people wanted the government to get with the program. By the time we got to the 2006 mid-term elections, it was politically safe for Democrats to attack the War on Terror without restraint, and the same thing won them back the presidency in 2008. Of course, you can say whatever you want, but it's actions - not words - you have to live with the consequences of. Obama did not close Gitmo, and didn't abandon a lot of Bush's other policies, because once he had a first term, he wanted a second one. It was one thing to denounce the fight against terrorism. That played well politically. It was another thing to actually let an attack happen on his watch. And even now, you see that he has tried his best to deny that either Benghazi or Boston were tied to the enemies we've been fighting for the last 12 years, because that undercuts what he really wants to do - which is to pick up our guns and go home. The best thing you can say here is that it's only an Obama speech, and those scarcely mean anything. We may very well keep pursuing operations against terrorists. But Obama will certainly not ask the nation to support the idea that we're in a struggle for our national security and our way of life. He's rather peddle the fantasy that the fight is already won, because it's the easiest way to get out of fighting it at all. That is something he has never really wanted to do.