GWB 2.0

Cementing the Bush Legacy

Jennifer Rubin - 05.16.2009 - 5:24 PM

George W. Bush must be smiling. He’s not talking in public about the Obama administration, but he can’t be displeased: his harshest critic is adopting most of his national security policies, albeit grudgingly and with a whole lot of spin. But not even the White House spinners can conceal what has happened.

The New York Times has figured it out:

Faced with the choice of signaling an unambiguous break with the policies of the Bush era, or maintaining some continuity with its practices, the president has begun to come down on the side of taking fewer risks with security, even though he is clearly angering the liberal elements of his political base. . . But the bottom line is that Mr. Obama’s course corrections have real-life consequences. Mr. Bush kept saying that he wanted to close Guantánamo Bay but could not find an effective replacement for it. So he never acted. Mr. Obama began with that action, and now discovers it is more difficult to accomplish than it seemed a few months ago.

The Obama team is loathe to admit this. So they dress up the decision to utilize military tribunals as a entirely different sort of approach than Bush. Rubbish. Like most observers who bother to look at the details and compare, the Wall Street Journal editors aren’t buying Obama’s tale that his are any different than Bush’s. Nevertheless the editors conclude:

Mr. Obama deserves credit for accepting that the civilian courts are largely unsuited for the realities of the war on terror. He has now decided to preserve a tribunal process that will be identical in every material way to the one favored by Dick Cheney — and which, contrary to the narrative that Democrats promulgated for years, will be the fairest and most open war-crimes trials in U.S. history. Meanwhile, friends should keep certain newspaper editors away from sharp objects. Their champion has repudiated them once again.

Perhaps the key test will be when that deadline on closing Guantanamo comes along and there is still no adequate alternative. ”Can’t close Guantanamo” is going to be pretty hard to spin as anything but confirmation of Bush’s detention policy.

The Left is apoplectic about all this. And conservatives are conflicted. (Does Obama get “credit”? Is this a change of heart or political convenience?) But it doesn’t really matter what Obama’s motives are. The reality is that on one national security decision after another he has come to conclusions strikingly similar to his predecessor. That likely makes George Bush happy. But more importantly, it makes us all safer.