By Brigitte L. Nacos

What a difference a year makes! Twelve months ago, the overwhelming majority of Americans and people around the globe cheered as the first African-American in the history of the country became the 44^th President of the United States. Many believed in candidate and newly sworn in president Barack Obama’s message that change for the better would come under his stewardship; many believed in his assuring slogan, “Yes, We Can!” Whatever Obama promised in much detail during his amazing campaign, people were mostly uplifted by the hope, even conviction, that here was a new type of politician and leader with an agenda that was fundamentally different from George W. Bush and his disastrous policies.

Much changed during the last twelve months—but it was not the change that Obama promised and his supporters expected. Yesterday’s stunning victory of a Republican in Massachusetts’ race to fill Edward M. Kennedy’s seat in the U.S. Senate may have been in part the result of Democrat Martha Coakley’s flawed campaign and Republican Scott Brown’s clever pretension that he is an Independent. But the result was also a reflection of the popular perception that things are not going well in the country, especially with respect to the economy, and that nothing has changed in Washington’s politics as usual during the first year of Obama’s presidency. Just like the Republican victories in last fall’s gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, Brown’s win in Massachusetts was decided by the growing middle of Independents, the very group that had contributed significantly to Obama’s victory in November 2008, and by disillusioned Democrats who either expressed their dissatisfaction by voting for Brown or did not bother to go to vote.

Post-partisan politics was a pipe dream to begin with; if anything, the nasty infighting between the right and left wing of the two established parties intensified—another reason for a growing segment of the electorate to be turned off. And many in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party who were the most enthusiastic supporters of candidate Obama and instrumental in his victorious primary fight against Hillary Clinton and later in his triumph over John McCain, are turned off for another reason. They blame the president for wasting time and substance by courting Republicans and conservative Democrats. They want this president to fight for and insist on an agenda of real change. The list of progressives’ discontent is long, but it is highlighted by the outrageous bargaining surrounding the health care reform and the continuation of the Bush/Cheney counterterrorism policies. If you want to get an idea about the criticism from the left, read “The Mendacity of Hope” by Roger D. Hodge in Harper’s.

Taking New Jersey, Virginia, and now Massachusetts as their cues, talking heads predict now that the elections this fall will bring about a colossal change in favor of Republicans in the Congress. While mid-term elections tend to favor the non-presidential party, much can and will happen in the nearly 10 months till Election Day in November. But unless the president and his administration as well as the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress pull together and act upon a realistic agenda that is explained to and understood by rank and file Americans, this year’s congressional elections may got the way Massachusetts went yesterday and, perhaps, set the stage for the presidential race in 2012.

First of all, administration and Democrats in Congress must concentrate on the economy and the dismal job market. To be sure, improvements will come slow. But by focusing most of all on the number one problem and concern of Americans, the perception of a do-nothing-government may decline.

Next, Democrats must go back to the drawing board with their health care reform plan. To this day, most Americans do not understand the content of the reform versions adopted by the House and the Senate. This gives critics who simply do not want reform ample room for going on the attack. Since a massive reform package has no chance, important parts must be adopted piece by piece. First in line here should be measures that promise to cut the governmental hand-outs to the insurance industry and stops insurances ability to fatten their profits at the expense of the sick and those they refuse to insure because of new or old health problems. Allowing to bringing in the same but much cheaper prescription drugs from foreign countries, too, is and should be a no- brainer for legislators—although they enjoy a most generous health care themselves. Perhaps the president and the people around him have forgotten what they learned in their undergraduate years, namely, that the chief executive—especially during real or perceived crises--must use his bully pulpit to persuade fellow-Washingtonians, especially in Congress, the public, and, when foreign policy is involved, leaders and publics abroad, and thereby enlist support. Think of Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power, Samuel Kernell’s Going Public, and Richard Rose’s The Post-Modern President and you will get the idea.  

President Obama is a charismatic communicator as he proved again and again during his election campaign but only on a few occasions during his first year in office. But failed utterly in taking a page from another great communicator's book: Ronald Reagan never tired to putting the blame for the country's economic ills onto the shoulder's of his predecessor Jimmy Carter. Doesn't the White House realize Obama's failure to similarly remind the public that the current economic and fiscal problems go back to the Bush administration? This failure contributed mightily to today's perception that everything--including the Wall Street bail-out--came upon us on Obama's watch. It is late but perhaps not too late, to change this perception if the president really tries.

However, the most important step now must be to pinpoint and adjust and in some instances change policy priorities, the second step must be the full presidential commitment to winning public support and put pressure on fellow-decision-makers—first and foremost at home but in a number of foreign policy matters abroad as well.

By Brigitte L. Nacos

It is amazing how the most bigotted right-wing pack has the nerve to attack Senator Reid and how he has been pressured into apologizing for a remark he made early in the 2008 campaign, namely, that then Senator Barack Obama could become the country’s first black president because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

While strangely using the language of the past, in content this was a reasonable assessment by someone who has no problems with racial and ethnic differences but is fully aware of the realities of prejudice and bigotry and,yes, racism in society. 

Reid has a strong pro-civil rights record and was among the earliest supporters of Obama. What he expressed was simply the concern that America is far from post-racial. Look at elected and appointed African-American public officials and corporate successes and you will see that lighter-skinned minorities have the edge. Just think of trailblazers like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. This all is rooted deeply in the past.

Not Reid but the conservative elite and the populist dividers should be blamed. Instead, a media--including the allegedly liberal media--that crave controversy echo the right-wing’s accusations of Reid’s “controversial” statement and run with comparisons to Trent Lott’s past embarrassments. When Lott boasted his support for one-time presidential candidate Strom Thurmond, a segregationist, he seemed to indicated that a Thurmond presidency would have meant a different course of history—presumably a derailment of the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King's role.

Harvard law professor Lani Guinier is the only one who got it right, when she said according to the New York Times that Mr. Lott “seemed to be expressing nostalgia for the segregationist platform of Mr. Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign, while Mr. Reid comments seemed to be addressing ‘an unfortunate truth about the present.’” Too bad that we do not see and hear Lani Guinier more in a media that give readily access to the practitioners of attack politics.

It is now clear that we do not have to wait for Sarah Palin to settle in at Fox News for a media removed from the fair and balanced label.

By Brigitte L. Nacos

“What he [President Obama] should be doing is following the right things that Bush did. One of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush.”

                                          Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani

After Rudy Giuliani got away with the incredible statement that no domestic terrorism occurred on President Bush’s watch when he was interviewed on Good Morning America by GeorgeStephanopoulos of ABC News Friday morning, his problem with reality and truth was thankfully exposed right away by several on-line watchdogs. How in heaven could a man whose claim to fame beyond New York City is tied to the 9/11 attacks “forget” the date of the worst terrorist nightmare on American soil? 

But this was not the only “memory lapse” in the service of political and partisan expediency. The night before he told Larry King that the  case of the would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid took place before 9/11 as an explanation why then President Bush did not mention the incident until six days after the failed attack. The fact is that the shoe bomber incident occurred on December 22, 2001—more than three months after 9/11.

One would expect that a man who built a lucrative business on the assumption that he is an expert on terrorism and its consequences would have the most basic facts and dates right. Instead, he actually spins stories of fact and fiction.

During his conversation with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Friday afternoon Giuliani claimed to have misspoken in his appearance on Good Morning America. But when Blitzer mentioned the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, Giuliani added another piece of fiction, when he said:

“Gee, Wolf, it not only happened, there was -- there was anthrax found in the office right next to mine. There was attack {sic] on city hall [emphasis added] as well as on the major networks and Governor Pataki's office. I mean, I as directly involved in that.”

But there was no anthrax attack on New York’s city hall at the time. Instead, a letter that was sent by NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw to Giuliani’s chief-of-staff Anthony V. Carbonetti contained some anthrax spores—seemingly coming from an anthrax letter addressed to Brokaw weeks earlier. 

And then there are the complete turnarounds in Giuliani’s opinions. In his interview with Stephanopoulos he complained that the case of the underwear bomber is handled by civilian courts, not military tribunals. Never mind that Zacarias Mousaoui, the would-be 9/11 hijacker was tried and convicted in a federal court as were shoe-bomber Reid and the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing Ramzi Yousef. After the latter was sentenced to life in prison, Giuliani said according to the New York Times that the sentencing ''sends a clear message to the world: the United States will vigorously prosecute and punish those who murder and maim the innocent.'' He was equally satisfied with the Mousaoui case that was handled in federal court.

Perhaps all of this wouldn’t matter that much if this were the efforts of one man to rewrite history. But it is in fact a strategy of conservative actors who were parts of and shapers of that history and now point their fingers elsewhere. This is the scheme of former Vice-President Dick Cheney and the female Cheney contingent, his former adviser Mary Matalin who blames the Clinton administration for the 9/11 attacks, and former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino who preceded Guiliani’s 9/11 denial by several weeks, when she claimed that there was no terrorist attack in our country during President Bush’s term.

Unfortunately, if bold-faced lies and half-truths are repeated often enough by people who are given generous access to the air waves as long as they promise controversy and attack politics, they tend to stick.

By Brigitte L. Nacos

In a clear-eyed, book-length assessment of the Bush-Cheney administration’s post-9/11 counterterrorism policy one of the foremost security experts, Stephen Flynn, wrote a few years ago, “What was initially advertised as a two-front effort quickly became a lopsided strategy in which protecting our homeland has been neglected while the vast majority of our resources and political capital have been expanded in ‘taking the battle to the enemy.’” But the idea of fighting terrorists abroad so that they cannot hit us at home was flawed from the start. Flynn was right in the past and he is right today, when he concluded, “Despite all the rhetoric since September 11, 2001, and some new federal spending on homeland security, America remains unprepared to prevent and respond to acts of catastrophic terrorism on U.S. soil.”

In short, what the state of affairs through G.W. Bush’s presidency was—and is now—comes down to homeland insecurity rather than security. Former Vice President Dick Cheney can boast all he wants that on his watch no further attacks in the homeland occurred after 9/11, but the frightening growth of the global leaderless jihad was fueled during and by America’s so-called “war against terrorism.” The record number of foiled attacks by home-grown jihadis in 2009, the bloody strike by an Army doctor at Fort Hood last November, and the failed bombing of Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day proved Stephen Flynn’s prediction right, namely, that in spite of the wars we fight abroad, “terrorists can still come here—and, worse yet, are being made here.”

While the Obama administration inherited this flawed counterterrorism policy, it is now high time for the president to recognize that he cannot follow the same path as his predecessor. Not at home and not abroad. Today’s meeting with members of the National Security Council must be the mere prelude to a comprehensive reassessment of homeland security and the adoption of more realistic and more effective policy priorities.

To be sure, the immediate focus will be on the multiple mistakes made by security agencies and personnel in Washington and abroad in the case of the would-be underwear bomber I wrote about earlier. We know now that the British government did share the name of the young Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the with U.S. agencies after they denied him entrance into the United Kingdom. Another clue that was missed by the intelligence community! Intelligence about the Fort Hood shooter, too, was not acted upon.

Obviously, the creation of the office of a director of national security and the establishment of the National Counterterrorism Center after 9/11, both charged with coordinating intelligence for the sake of effective counterterrorism, did not overcome the traditional lack of intelligence-sharing by and the turf fights between the multitude of intelligence agencies. This must change. And it must change now. 

Perhaps, airport and aviation security can be tightened up--although terrorists triumph when we violate our fundamental values--including the right to privacy. Moreover, to continue to put preventative eggs mostly into the air traffic security basket at the expense of equally attractive terrorist targets would be a grave mistake. Think of vulnerable seaports, chemical plants, cruise and cargo ships, biological agents, and alike.

The American public must be told that there is not and will never be perfect homeland security, no complete protection against terrorist attacks. Just as there is no way to prevent car accidents. Such realistic assessments would be more helpful in preventing fear and anxiety than the terror threat alerts of the past and the silence today.

Abroad the problems are mounting and need to be addressed. The notion that wars can be fought and military forces deployed to defeat terrorist groups and cells and deny them safe havens in failed or failing states is wishful thinking. Unfortunately, there are too many failed states and brown areas that cannot be controlled by central governments to deny terrorists hiding places and training grounds. If the military surge in Afghanistan and intensified attacks on radical extremists’ strongholds in Pakistan were to succeed, there are plenty of safe havens in Yemen and Somalia and Sudan and in the South of the Philippines, and so on… And then there is the rising mobilization of susceptible people in the Muslim diaspora in Western Europe and in North America that surely cannot be fought with military might.

While we ought to think about long-term strategies to prevent the spread of inspirational terrorism contagion, there must be short-term measures in the most acute areas of threat abroad. Unfortunately, the U.S. military is overextended already because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s especially true for special operations forces which are most effective in fighting non-state actors.

The Obama administration must reverse its Iraq and Afghanistan policies—more rapid withdrawal from Iraq and no or less of a troop surge for Afghanistan. And aide money should not flow generously into countries, where Americans are dying while other foreigners pursue their economic interest. Just think of the Chinese company that recently began to extract from a mine in Afghanistan considered one of the richest untapped deposits on earth!

To remove or limit U.S. involvement there would free funds and special forces to fight—with and without allies--those jihadis that stir hate and violence against the United States in a multitude of states. Instead of closing down embassies (as the other day in Yemen) and yield to terrorists’ threats, countries should protect their missions. Acting otherwise would mean giving in to terrorists. After all, one of the main objectives of Al Qaeda and like-minded circles is the removal of Western interests from Arab and Muslim lands.

And, again, the key to effective prevention of terrorism and fighting those who plot and carry out this sort of political violence at home and abroad is good and shared intelligence.   

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Republicans did not lose time to attack President Obama and his administration after Umar Farouk Abdulmuttallab, a passenger on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, tried to detonate PETN, a powerful plastic explosive he had hidden in his underpants.

To begin with, Representative Peter King and others criticized the president for not addressing the nation right after the failed attempt on Christmas Day. It is far from clear that this would have been the right move. Why add to the media hype and reward the masterminds of the latest terror plot with the highest level attention they crave? After all, the attempt failed. [As an aside, one wonders why the same people who are so eager to go public with their criticism of Obama remained silent, when President George W. Bush failed to pay attention to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, a real catastrophe…]

More troubling are the Cheney-like voices who exploit the failed attempt by the would-be underwear bomber to intensify their attacks on the current administration’s counterterrorism policy. An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal is a case in point. It calls Janet Napolitano “Secretary of Homeland Anxiety.” If anyone deserves this name, it is the first Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge who took his cue for raising the color-coded terror threat alerts from a White House that was aware that public fear of further terrorism increased the president’s approval ratings and his chances for reelection in 2004.  

As for the Obama administration’s counterterrorism efforts, they are mostly continuations of measures put in place in the more than seven post-9/11 years of the Bush administration. That is true for airport and aviation security as it is for the intelligence about possible terrorists in pertinent data bases. From what is known so far Abdulmuttallab’s name was on the list of persons with alleged connections to terrorists but not on the no-fly roster. Obviously, it does not make sense to have more than half-a-million names on a general list of somewhat suspect persons without checking that list constantly against important developments and new information—in this case the alarm triggered by the would-be bombers own father. Moreover, these lists should be shared with allies and equally vulnerable countries.

Just as there was a chance to prevent the 9/11 attacks, if intelligence on some of the hijackers and FBI agents’ field reports had been coordinated and analyzed, the available information about Abdulmuttallab (his father’s alarm in reaction to his son’s embracing of the jihadi cause, his purchase of a one-way ticket to the U.S., his traveling without checking luggage) should have been enough to follow the example of U.K. authorities that stopped him from entering the country.

Far more important than fighting over terminology (I actually prefer the term terrorism rather than “radical extremism”) are urgently needed improvements in the way intelligence is shared, analyzed, and utilized in order to prevent terrorism. Not only aviation terrorism. At this time, terrorists may well watch the heightened attention to airport and aviation security in the wake of the most recent incident to select very different targets.

As for Republicans and aviation security, Politico reminded us this morning that "[o]ver the summer, 108 House Republicans voted against the final conference report of the 2010 appropriation bill for the Department of Homeland Security, which included funding for explosives detection systems and other aviation security measures."

Referring the claim of responsibility by Al Qaeda’s branch in the Arabian peninsula, the Wall Street Journal editorialized, “Al Qaeda has sent a message to the Obama Administration: You are in a war. Someone in our government needs to say clearly that they now understand the message.”

Why in heaven should somebody in our government say that they now understand the message? In their many, many pre- and post-9/11 communications Al Qaeda leaders have repeated their declarations of war again and again. And the Bush administration was all too willing to respond with the “war on terrorism” that is now continued by the Obama administration.

I repeat what I have written here and elsewhere many times: Wars cannot be fought successfully against terrorists precisely because they are non-state actors without armies. Wars certainly cannot be fought against a global web of semi- or fully autonomous terrorist cells or lone wolves who are infected with the virus of hate and terror. Wars can be fought against state sponsors of terrorism.

Intelligence can pinpoint terrorist headquarters, training facilities, hiding places that then can be attacked by military forces, commandos or unmanned predators. Indeed, under President Obama’s watch predator strikes against terrorists and their supporters in Pakistan and Yemen in particular have been successful and significantly increased. On this count, the troop surge for Afghanistan, and the slow-pace troop withdrawal from Iraq, the Obama administration certainly shouldn’t be lectured by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and similar conservative voices.

Nor should the Journal’s editorial writers sell as a new insight what everyone with any interest in terrorism and counterterrorism knows for a long time, namely, as they put it, “we have to think more broadly about jihad and the potential recruitment of terrorists anywhere in the world, including inside the United States. We and our European allies have to revisit the problem of fiery imams using mosques as recruitment depots for airline suicide bombers. The close call in the airspace over Detroit gives ‘probable cause’ new meaning.”

No, we knew about this global recruitment scheme and that this sort of inspirational terrorist contagion cannot be fought in a war long before that close call on Christmas Day.

It is despicable that the House Republican Conference offers TV networks appearances by GOP lawmakers who are eager to attack the Obama administration's alleged mishandling of counterterrorism.These are the same types who pleaded for bipartisanship in matters of terrorism/counterterrorism when George W. Bush resided in the White House.

P.S.  (Dec. 30, 2009) As expected, Dick Cheney could not keep his tongue but joined the conservative chorus of Obama critics. As POLITICO reports this morning, "Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Barack Obama on Tuesday of 'trying to pretend we are not at war' with terrorists, pointing to the White House response to the attempted sky bombing as reflecting a pattern that includes banishing the term 'war on terror' and attempting to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center."

Cheney's stubborn defense of the "war on terrorism" term plays actually into literally all terrorists' linguistic preferences; they all claim to be warriors, combatants, soldiers, members of armies or commandos who fight wars against their enemies. Why elevate them to something they are not?