Word: doesn
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...boosting America's means but narrowing its ends. The same logic underlies his outreach to Iran and Syria and his rhetoric about groups like Hizballah and Hamas. Obama's not trying to end the war on terrorism, but he is trying to downsize it - so that it doesn't overwhelm the U.S.'s capacities and crowd out his other priorities. (See pictures of Afghanistan's dangerous Korengal Valley...
...Obama, by contrast, doesn't need to go hunting for grand challenges. From preventing a depression to providing universal health care to stopping global warming, he has them in spades. Bush could afford to define the war on terrorism broadly because he didn't think anything going on at home was nearly as important. Obama, on the other hand, must find space (and money) for what he sees as equally grave domestic threats. Bush loved the ominous, elastic noun terrorism. Obama, according to an analysis by Politico, has publicly uttered the words health and economy twice as often as terrorism...
...These days the U.S. doesn't look quite so omnipotent. Insurgents in Iraq and now Afghanistan have learned how to throw sand in our war-fighting machine. Economically, our gaping deficits are making it harder to run the war on terrorism on a blank check. And ideologically, violent, illiberal movements like Hamas, Hizballah and the Taliban have proved that they have deeper roots in native soil than the Bushies assumed. At West Point, Obama said he would not "set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means or our interests." Bush never spoke in that language of limits...
...Obama is trying to make a virtue of necessity. Since the U.S. can't defeat all terrorism-supporting movements and regimes, he's arguing that it doesn't have to, since most of them are not committing terrorism against us. As Bruce Riedel, who ran Obama's initial Afghanistan and Pakistan review, puts it, "He's going after the organization that attacked the U.S. on 9/11 and before and since rather than pursuing a vague and murky war on terrorism everywhere." Team Obama has junked the phrase war on terror, not to mention Islamofascism. And the World...
...Obama's narrower struggle against al-Qaeda, however, a cold war with Tehran makes little sense. For all its nastiness, the Iranian regime doesn't direct its terrorism against the U.S. And Iran's Shi'ite theocrats have a mostly hostile relationship with the anti-Shi'ite theocrats of al-Qaeda. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran has caused trouble for the U.S. largely out of fear that if the U.S. prevails in those countries, Iran will be next. But the Obama Administration seems to believe that if the U.S. can convince Iran's regime that it's not next...