Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency.

• Author: Friedman, Benjamin H.
• Position: Book review

Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency Daniel Klaidman New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012, 304 pp.

The Republican Party at least has the decency not to get its civil libertarian supporters' hopes up. Bemused tolerance and the odd Ron Paul appearance are about 'all the encouragement they get. Democratic civil libertarians, by contrast, suffer from relevance. Like other interests large enough to matter in primary elections but loyal enough to betray later, they are seduced and then scorned, especially by presidents. Their disappointment is harsher because it is less expected.

Senator Barack Obama was well-suited to secure the triumph of liberal hope over that experience. One reason was his identity: urban black constitutional law teachers with Ivy-league pedigrees seem unlikely exponents of state policing and military power. Along with revulsion at the outgoing administration, that identity was enough to get the ACLU part of the base in Jerry Maguire mode ("you had me at hello"). But there was substance too: Obama's denunciation of the Iraq War, the Guantanamo Bay prison (Gitmo), coercive interrogation methods, mad the Bush administration's "color-coded politics of fear."

Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of Obama Presidency, by jouralist Daniel Klaidman, partly explains how the Obama administration has dashed civil libertarians" expectations. The title misleads in two ways. First, though the book touches on various counterterrorism policies, two predominate: (1) the administration's expansion of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; and (2) its effort, abandoned in the face of congressional opposition, to close Gitmo and to release or try the suspected terrorists there in civilian court. Second, the book shows that the White House was not willing to run much political risk in these areas. Its soul was elsewhere.

Before turning to Klaidman's treatment of those choices, it is worth putting them in the context of Obama's overall national security policies. Even when he took office, there was ample evidence that his dovish positions would not outlast their political convenience. He had already reversed himself on the Bush administration's National Security Agency warrantless surveillance program, having voted in the Senate to legalize the program and shield telecommunications companies from liability for facilitating it. Obama's position on Iraq had not been risky when he took it as...