Conservatives Skip Obama's National Security Successes at CPAC

When Liz Cheney addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, she took President Barack Obama to task for what she said has been a dangerously misguided and ineffective approach to national security.

"We've learned he wants to go around the world and apologize for this great country of ours," she said. "We've learned he wants to give rights to terrorists, including the right to remain silent. We've learned he wants to move dangerous terrorists from Guantanamo onto the American homeland while he investigates and possibly prosecutes the CIA officers who interrogated them. That is not change we can believe in."

Cheney went on to say that the Obama administration has diminished the country's ability to gather intelligence, allowed America's counterterrorism capacity to erode, and ignored crucial intelligence on Yemen that could have prevented the attempted Christmas Day attack on a Detroit-bound flight. "One can't help but think that they don't understand who the enemy is," she said.

But in Cheney's 20-minute address to CPAC, she never mentioned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor did she speak about the arrests in recent weeks of two senior Taliban leaders -- Mullah Abdul Salam and Mullah Mir Mohammed of Baghlan -- with American support in Pakistan. She also didn't note the capture last month of the insurgency's top military commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Abdul Salam and Mir Mohammed were senior, command-level organizers of resistance and insurgency operations for the Taliban.

"The arrests represent a potential major pivot in the activities against the Taliban in Afghanistan, but more importantly in our relationship with Pakistan," said Steve Clemons, the director of foreign policy programs at the New America Foundation, which describes itself as a nonpartisan public policy institute. Clemons said that National Security Adviser Jim Jones and others have been working assiduously to develop a better operational relationship with Pakistan to fight the Taliban, and the arrests are partially a result of that work. "The guys they've arrested are the right guys. Had this been going on during the Bush administration, I think the Bush people would have been touting it like crazy."

Clemons added of the arrests, "It doesn't mean all the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan are solved, but it's a major operational success."

Over the course of the first two days of CPAC, Cheney was far from being the only speaker who failed to mention the Taliban arrests, or even the Iraq and Afghan wars, in their criticisms of the president's record on national security. From Tim Pawlenty to Mitt Romney to John Ashcroft, Jim DeMint, Dick Armey and dozens of others, the full, complicated and sometimes conflicting story of the transition of national security policy from the Bush administration to the Obama administration was never discussed.

Ben Wittes, a senior fellow and legal scholar at the Brookings Institution, said that both the conservative base and liberal base are failing to admit that the Obama administration, in most cases, has continued the policies of the Bush administration because that reality does not fit into either camp's narrative. "There is a conflict in both political worlds," he said.

"The real story is that the Obama administration has accelerated all of the trends that were already underway in the Bush administration, but that the Bush administration was either unwilling or unable to continue to its logical conclusion," said Wittes. "The Obama administration revved up the engines that the Bush administration started."

From closing secret CIA prisons to reducing the prison population at Guantanamo Bay to using secret wire taps, Wittes said, "It's a case where the Bush administration goes 50 yards down the field and the Obama administration picks up the ball and keeps going further down the field."

The issue of whether terrorists should be treated as criminals with Miranda rights, or as enemy combatants, was repeatedly discussed at CPAC, generating heated disagreement with the Obama administration. But Wittes said that no administration has ever initially declared a person arrested in the United States to be an enemy combatant since World War II, when several Nazi saboteurs were caught domestically and tried in military commisisons.

"There simply is no case that we have pulled somebody off of a plane and treated them as an enemy combatant, not under the Bush administration." Wittes said that two terrorists were eventually declared enemy combatants by the Bush administration, but only after first being held in the criminal justice system.

"As a policy matter, I think there's really good case for having more flexibility to detain and question people, but as a matter of history and precedent, there's no question it favors what the Obama administration did."

As CPAC continues Saturday, it's fair to say that news of the Taliban arrests probably won't make its way into conservatives' prepared speeches. Nor should anyone expect liberals at their next confab to tout the fact that the change they believed in on national security is actually an acceleration of Bush policies they railed against for eight years.

As the New America Foundation's Steve Clemons said, "It's an inconvenient truth."