POWER WARS
Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency
Charlie Savage
Little, Brown & Compan
769 pages; $21.6
When Paris was attacked last month, politicians and pundits fell all over themselves rushing to proclaim what Washington should do next in the war on terror. The vast majority of them would have done better to keep quiet and read Charlie Savage's new book, Power Wars, instead. It offers a master class in how to think seriously about crucial aspects of the subject.
A Pulitzer Prize winner, a reporter for The New York Times and the author of an earlier book on the George W Bush administration, Mr Savage provides a comprehensive, authoritative history of the legal side of national security policy making during the Barack Obama years. That might sound dry and forbidding, especially in a book so dense and long (almost 700 pages of text). But anyone truly interested in foreign policy or national security should find it essential and enthralling, thanks to the author's intelligence, objectivity, legwork and literary skill.
Mr Savage has the instincts of a journalist but the soul of a wonk. He understands that policymaking is about choice, and for every issue discussed - from detention and interrogation of terrorist suspects, to surveillance and targeting, to the White House's tussles with Congress over war powers - he methodically describes the problems administration officials faced, the options they considered and why they decided as they did. Readers come away understanding not just what happened but why.
There have been debates about the laws of war for centuries, but over the past couple of decades the scope and complexity of national security law have exploded as terrorism has thrust the United States into an omnipresent conflict with malevolent stateless actors operating in the shadows. Democratic governments naturally want to do whatever they can to protect their citizens, Mr Savage notes, but they also want to avoid breaking the law - and so it becomes crucial to decide just what counterterrorism tools are legally permissible.
The Bush administration entered office already determined to eliminate what it saw as excessive post - Watergate restrictions on presidential authority, and the 9/11 attacks only strengthened that conviction. So the administration initially dealt with the legal dilemmas of counterterrorism by having sympathetic government lawyers authorise the aggressive policies it wanted, using a somewhat more sophisticated version of Richard Nixon's reasoning that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." Observers on both sides of the aisle expected dramatic changes with the arrival of a Democratic administration in 2009. Why those changes never happened is the underlying theme of Mr Savage's book.
The answer, he says, lies in appreciating that legal criticisms of the Bush administration's war on terror actually came in two flavours. Some critics opposed Mr Bush's policies on civil liberties grounds, while others opposed them for procedural reasons. The key members of Mr Obama's legal team were drawn from the second camp, and that made all the difference.
Take the question of so-called warrantless wiretapping. To simplify: Was the main problem the wiretapping part (that is, blanket surveillance involving an inherently inappropriate violation of citizens' rights), or the warrantless part (that the bulk data collection was implemented without appropriate legal sanction)? If you take the first approach, the Obama administration's continuation of the programmes has been disgraceful. If you take the second, the Obama team's success in putting them on firmer legal ground with stronger oversight is a significant accomplishment.
Mr Savage walks the reader through dozens of these debates with a sure hand, translating arcane legal reasoning into plain English. His summary of the fight over whether the government is allowed to deliberately kill a United States citizen without a trial - an issue raised by the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, a major figure in Al Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate - is a model of lucidity. And his explanation of why it has proved so difficult to close down the prison at Guantánamo Bay despite the president's own obvious passion for the issue is convincing, if depressing.
The Obama administration, Mr Savage concludes, proved less able or willing to change course than anybody expected - in part because it decided, in practice, that many alternative policy approaches to the war on terror were worse. "Instead of rethinking basic premises of the national security state, then, Mr Obama accepted them but sought to find a stronger legal framework for carrying out its policy prescriptions."
At one point, Mr Savage quotes a disappointed critic who accuses the Obama administration's lawyers of having "traded in strict fealty to international law for potential influence on executive decision-making," contributing not to law but to a "law-like discourse" that legitimised practices "that do not, ultimately, seem bound by international law - at least not by any conception of international law recognisable to international lawyers, especially those outside of the US."
Such critiques will fall by the wayside, Mr Savage notes, if over time a consensus develops that the administration's compromises represent a sensible fusing of principle and practicality. But if the administration's new norms are not ultimately embraced, the critique will hold up. Either way, Mr Savage's superb book should stand as an indispensable guide to the debate.
Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency
Charlie Savage
Little, Brown & Compan
769 pages; $21.6
When Paris was attacked last month, politicians and pundits fell all over themselves rushing to proclaim what Washington should do next in the war on terror. The vast majority of them would have done better to keep quiet and read Charlie Savage's new book, Power Wars, instead. It offers a master class in how to think seriously about crucial aspects of the subject.
A Pulitzer Prize winner, a reporter for The New York Times and the author of an earlier book on the George W Bush administration, Mr Savage provides a comprehensive, authoritative history of the legal side of national security policy making during the Barack Obama years. That might sound dry and forbidding, especially in a book so dense and long (almost 700 pages of text). But anyone truly interested in foreign policy or national security should find it essential and enthralling, thanks to the author's intelligence, objectivity, legwork and literary skill.
Mr Savage has the instincts of a journalist but the soul of a wonk. He understands that policymaking is about choice, and for every issue discussed - from detention and interrogation of terrorist suspects, to surveillance and targeting, to the White House's tussles with Congress over war powers - he methodically describes the problems administration officials faced, the options they considered and why they decided as they did. Readers come away understanding not just what happened but why.
There have been debates about the laws of war for centuries, but over the past couple of decades the scope and complexity of national security law have exploded as terrorism has thrust the United States into an omnipresent conflict with malevolent stateless actors operating in the shadows. Democratic governments naturally want to do whatever they can to protect their citizens, Mr Savage notes, but they also want to avoid breaking the law - and so it becomes crucial to decide just what counterterrorism tools are legally permissible.
The Bush administration entered office already determined to eliminate what it saw as excessive post - Watergate restrictions on presidential authority, and the 9/11 attacks only strengthened that conviction. So the administration initially dealt with the legal dilemmas of counterterrorism by having sympathetic government lawyers authorise the aggressive policies it wanted, using a somewhat more sophisticated version of Richard Nixon's reasoning that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." Observers on both sides of the aisle expected dramatic changes with the arrival of a Democratic administration in 2009. Why those changes never happened is the underlying theme of Mr Savage's book.
The answer, he says, lies in appreciating that legal criticisms of the Bush administration's war on terror actually came in two flavours. Some critics opposed Mr Bush's policies on civil liberties grounds, while others opposed them for procedural reasons. The key members of Mr Obama's legal team were drawn from the second camp, and that made all the difference.
Take the question of so-called warrantless wiretapping. To simplify: Was the main problem the wiretapping part (that is, blanket surveillance involving an inherently inappropriate violation of citizens' rights), or the warrantless part (that the bulk data collection was implemented without appropriate legal sanction)? If you take the first approach, the Obama administration's continuation of the programmes has been disgraceful. If you take the second, the Obama team's success in putting them on firmer legal ground with stronger oversight is a significant accomplishment.
Mr Savage walks the reader through dozens of these debates with a sure hand, translating arcane legal reasoning into plain English. His summary of the fight over whether the government is allowed to deliberately kill a United States citizen without a trial - an issue raised by the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, a major figure in Al Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate - is a model of lucidity. And his explanation of why it has proved so difficult to close down the prison at Guantánamo Bay despite the president's own obvious passion for the issue is convincing, if depressing.
The Obama administration, Mr Savage concludes, proved less able or willing to change course than anybody expected - in part because it decided, in practice, that many alternative policy approaches to the war on terror were worse. "Instead of rethinking basic premises of the national security state, then, Mr Obama accepted them but sought to find a stronger legal framework for carrying out its policy prescriptions."
At one point, Mr Savage quotes a disappointed critic who accuses the Obama administration's lawyers of having "traded in strict fealty to international law for potential influence on executive decision-making," contributing not to law but to a "law-like discourse" that legitimised practices "that do not, ultimately, seem bound by international law - at least not by any conception of international law recognisable to international lawyers, especially those outside of the US."
Such critiques will fall by the wayside, Mr Savage notes, if over time a consensus develops that the administration's compromises represent a sensible fusing of principle and practicality. But if the administration's new norms are not ultimately embraced, the critique will hold up. Either way, Mr Savage's superb book should stand as an indispensable guide to the debate.
©2015 The New York Times News Service