Ten Years Without an Attack

From John Yoo, at Wall Street Journal (alternative link). Discussing President George W. Bush's leadership, Yoo writes:

Looking back over the decade, the first clear lesson is the critical importance of Mr. Bush’s decision to consider the struggle with al Qaeda a war. Unlike past administrations, his chose not to view al Qaeda as a Middle Eastern version of the mafia, if on a grander scale. The 9/11 attacks constituted an act of war—they were a decapitation strike, an effort to eliminate our nation’s leadership in a single blow. If the Soviet Union had carried out the same attacks, no one would have doubted that the United States was at war.

Al Qaeda’s independence from any nation state would not shield it from the American military and leave it solely to the more tender mercies of the FBI and the courts.

Choosing war opened the arsenal that has decimated al Qaeda’s leadership and blunted its plan of attack. A nation at war need not wait for a suicide bombing to arrest the “suspects” who remain. Instead, it can fire missiles or send in covert teams to pre-emptively capture or kill the enemy. Our government doesn’t need a judge’s permission before tapping an al Qaeda operative’s phones, intercepting his emails, or arresting him.

We need not provide terrorists with Miranda warnings, lawyers and jury trials. A nation at war can detain the enemy without lawyers or civilian trials and interrogate them for information to prevent future attacks.

In its second critical decision, the Bush administration pushed to translate knowledge into action. Winning the war requires, above all, the gathering, analysis and exploitation of intelligence. Before 9/11 our national security bureaucracies, prodded by the civil liberties worries of the courts and Congress, had deliberately handicapped their ability to pull all intelligence into a single mosaic. Passage of the Patriot Act, the expanded interception of international terrorist emails and phone calls, and the tough interrogation of a few high-ranking al Qaeda leaders broadened and deepened the pool of information on our enemy.

At the same time, the intelligence community and the U.S. Armed Forces have honed the integration of tactical intelligence and operations to a deadly knife’s-edge. Bin Laden’s killing this summer was not a one-off lucky shot, but the culmination of a decade of work combining intelligence-gathering, analysis and rapid strike teams. American presidents did not have such reliable options in the past—witness Jimmy Carter’s disastrous attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages or Bill Clinton’s failure to kill or capture bin Laden.

RELATED: "John Yoo at David Horowitz's West Coast Retreat, April 3, 2011."

John Yoo at David Horowitz's West Coast Retreat, April 3, 2011

I have a new essay at NewsReal Blog, "John Yoo at West Coast Retreat: Obama Has Made Us Less Safe."

Professor Yoo hammered the Obama administration’s foreign policy. President Obama has, he said, in attempting to dismantle the legal framework of the Bush administration’s anti-terror program, made Americans less safe. Not only did Obama attempt to shutter Guantanamo, but under his watch more than a quarter of the enemy combatants released from detention have returned to the field of battle. Professor Yoo indicated that the nature of the war on terror has changed significantly since the first few years after September 11. Al Qaeda has become increasingly decentralized as a terrorist organization, and transnational recruitment in the U.S. and Europe is a growing source of combatants for the next wave of operations. There are less likely to be large-scale attacks along the lines of 9/11, and more like that of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner two Christmases ago.

More later ...