OUR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:

Ironically, the aspects of U.S. counterterrorism to which he has made the least significant changes are the very ones that he was initially most determined to alter. The Bush administration's "global war on terrorism" has been replaced by a campaign known as "countering violent extremism" to serve as the overarching U.S. strategy to combat transnational Salafi jihadist groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS. But the new phraseology masks many similarities. The "kinetic" fight--the use of deadly force by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies--has continued unabated, mostly in the form of drone strikes, since Obama took office. According to estimates collected by The Long War Journal, the United States has launched approximately 450 such attacks in Pakistan and Yemen during Obama's tenure, killing some 2,800 suspected terrorists and around 200 civilians.

In many important ways, the relationship between Bush's and Obama's counterterrorism programs is marked by continuity as much as by change. And although Obama explicitly outlawed Bush's "enhanced interrogation techniques"--rightly classifying them as torture--and closed the so-called black sites where the CIA carried out the abuse, those changes were not as significant as they might appear. According to Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel from October 2003 until June 2004, the Bush administration had halted the practice of waterboarding (without specifically declaring it illegal) by 2003, and the black sites had been largely emptied by 2007. And although Obama denounced abusive interrogations and extralegal detentions, he did so presumably knowing full well that a number of Washington's Middle Eastern allies in the struggle against Salafi jihadists would nonetheless continue to engage in such activities, and therefore, if those techniques happened to produce useful intelligence, the United States could still benefit from it.

Perhaps the most surprising continuity between Bush's and Obama's counterterrorism records is the fact that the U.S. detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, remains open. One of Obama's first acts as president was to sign an executive order requiring that the Pentagon shut down the facility within a year. But in March 2011, after facing years of intense bipartisan congressional opposition to that plan, Obama ordered the resumption of military commissions at Guantánamo and officially sanctioned the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists held there without charge--two of the policies he had vowed to change. In this case, the president's idealistic goals became hard to sustain once the duty to protect American lives became his primary responsibility.

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