What Obama Wont Say In Charlotte: War On Terror Is Done

• By Spencer Ackerman
• Email Author
• September 4, 2012 |

President Obama greets troops at Ft. Bliss, Texas, Aug. 31. Photo: Department of Defense/Flickr

You’re about to hear a lot from the Democratic National Convention about the Master of the World the rest of us call President Barack Obama. Since the Charlotte convention will place national security at the fore of Obama’s reelection hopes, Democrats will show voters Obama The World Leader, Obama The War-Ender, and above all, Obama The Osama Killer. And all of this will risk Obama missing the greatest opportunity of all: declaring an end to the United States’ 11 years of fear and bloody, expensive global counterterrorist war.

Democrats, for the first time in decades, have an advantage with voters on national security. A June Fox News poll found Obama had a 13-point advantage on counterterrorism; and an August Reuters poll gave him a nine-point advantage on national security and foreign policy in general. And media reports about their imminent Charlotte confab indicate they’ll seek to maximize that newfound advantage. Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe reported Monday that the convention will emphasize how Obama (mostly) ended the Iraq war and is drawing down in Afghanistan; how he’s working with other countries on issues like preventing a nuclear Iran rather than in spite of them; and, especially, how he ordered the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden. More subtly — but unmistakably — they’ll likely say that GOP nominee Mitt Romney is a geopolitical lightweight and a reckless warmonger.

But like the dog who finally catches the car, it’s unclear if Democrats actually know what to do with their new national security bona fides. Because the portrait likely to be displayed in Charlotte leaves out most of what Obama’s foreign policy really is, at least on counterterrorism: a continuation of the policies of George W. Bush’s second term, when Bush sanded down his harder edges. (More about that in a second.) And, unless Obama really plans something dramatic and unexpected for his Thursday renomination speech, he’ll miss a huge opportunity to say that the U.S.’ painful and single-minded focus on counterterrorism can finally come to a safe, responsible end.

That opportunity comes as an inadvertent gift from Obama’s political opposition. There was something missing from last week’s Republican convention in Tampa: the paranoid, wasteful, divisive and effective politics of the 9/11 Era. You didn’t hear a repeat of Sarah Palin’s accusation that Obama is “worried that someone won’t read [al-Qaida] their rights,” as she did four years ago. Nor did you get a remix of Zell Miller’s (in)famous 2004 assertion that “today’s Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator.” Since Romney thinks he can defeat Obama on a message of economic recovery, his convention relegated national security to the margins. Romney’s own nomination speech tucked a short segment on global affairs toward the end. He did not discuss 9/11, nor the Afghanistan war — as the Obama campaign didn’t hesitate to remind reporters in blast e-mail after blast e-mail.

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