Atlantic Council

In recent weeks, former Vice President Dick Cheney has repeatedly proclaimed that changes in U.S. national security policy ordered by President Obama have made the country less safe.  In a speech at the Atlantic Council that was his first domestic address, Obama's national security advisor, General Jim Jones, said the opposite is true : "I firmly believe that the United States is not only safe, but will be more secure, and the American people are increasingly safer because of the president's leadership that he has displayed consistently over the last four months both at home and abroad."

Cheney has excoriated the administration for ending military tribunals, ordering Guantanimo closed, and abandoning enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding:  "I think those programs were absolutely essential to the success we enjoyed of being able to collect the intelligence that let us defeat all further attempts to launch attacks against the United States since 9/11. . . . President Obama campaigned against it all across the country. And now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack."

Jones, however, insisted, "The United States is safer because we have rejected the false choice between safety and our ideals."  More boldly, he declared, "Guantanamo probably created more terrorists than it ever housed."

In the question and answer session that followed Jones' formal remarks, Atlantic Council president and CEO Fred Kempe asked whether this is a "healthy" debate.   Jones declared that it was.   While humorously allowing that "no administration would ever say they are making us less safe," he argued that "it is important to raise the question."  Indeed, it is the most fundamental question any administration must ask itself every day. That said, he got beyond the talking points and admitted, "I think that the former vice president knows full well that perfection is an impossible standard" but that his administration — as with any administration —  works tirelessly to "keep threats at bay and as far away from our shores as possible."

It was once said that politics stops at the water's edge.  If that was ever truly the case, the custom has largely been observed in the breach over the past twenty or so years.  While it's absolutely necessary to debate how a given policy decision affects the security of the United States and its citizens, the current framing has been unhelpful.

Cheney sees himself and his former administration under assault with the overturning of some of its more controversial policies and is fighting back.  If incarceration of prisoners without trial and Guantanamo and waterboarding the most dangerous of them for information didn't make the country safe, then how could they be justified?

Given the nature of presidential campaigns, which encourage exaggerating the differences between candidates and parties with inflammatory rhetoric, the appearance of a radical change of direction and a sharp repudiation of the previous administration is stark.  Further, Obama has continued the rhetoric in order to change the optics.   This, despite the fact that the changes are mostly cosmetic.   Waterboarding and most other "enhanced interrogation techniques" had long since been abandoned, the "closing" of Gitmo is more talk than reality, and the creation of a system of due process for those incarcerated had been ordered by the courts and was underway. 

Dick Cheney and the Bush administration did their very best to keep the nation safe.  Inevitably, they made some mistakes and some controversial decisions.  It is only natural that new leadership — especially one of a different party — was going to reevaluate some of those policies and make changes.  Team Obama will make mistakes, too; perhaps they already have.  But they're making these judgments in an honest belief that they're in the best national security interests of the country.

James Joyner is managing editor of the Atlantic Council.