"On Our Terms"

Today was a great day: Obama signed executive orders that close Gitmo, review military trials and ban torture across the government.

Obama then said this:

The message we are sending around the world is that the US intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism and we are going to do so vigilantly, we are going to do so effectively, and we are going to do so in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals ... We intend to win this fight, and we intend to win it on our terms.

"On our terms." That is the central, essential idea when it comes to the fight against terrorism: Fighting terrorism the way that Bush did -- a lack of due process, the use of torture, black sites, extraordinary rendition -- was to fight on Al Qaida's terms. It was to let this group, a bunch of fanatic thugs, determine the nature of the fight, to fight on its level, with its principles, and not ours. What Bush and Cheney never got was that the great challenge of terrorism -- all terrorism -- is that conflict happens not just on a physical level, but on a moral and propagandistic one. Terrorists aren't just a threat because they might use illegitimate weapons and kill civilians, they are a threat because of how they tempt governments to respond. Getting a government to overreact is a victory for a terrorist group -- it is one of the chief weapons of terrorism -- because overreaction undermines a government's legitimacy and/or popularity. It undermines the principles on which it is based. We end up doing to ourselves what Al Qaida never could alone. Fighting terrorism while keeping our principles denies this weapon to our enemies. This is what Obama gets.

With these, as well as yesterdays ethics and transparency orders, the first two days have been way beyond what I hoped. I want to emphasize that it is still early, and we won't really know how serious Obama is about these policies until they colide with real world situations (already the ethics rules are encountering some challenges and not coming out totally clean.) But so far there is good reason to be optimistic.