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HOME NEWS WORLD NEWS BARACK OBAMA
ByPeter Foster, US Editor
10:59PM BST 19 Apr 2013
In his State of the Union address to the American people
earlier this year, Barack Obama declared that he was
"confident" of achieving "our objective of defeating the core
of
al-Qaeda".
Although he acknowledged the need to pursue the "remnants"
of the terrorist group and its affiliates, the overall message
was
clear al-Qaeda was badly degraded, the tides of war were
receding and the US was winning this fight that was no
longer
even officially a war.
The Boston bombings would appear to present a fundamental
challenge to that assessment and once again bring the
nagging
uncertainty of terrorism back on to the American main
street.
It is too soon to be absolutely sure the attacks were
motivated
by jihadist ideology, but the Islamic videos on the website of
the
older of the two Tsarnaev brothers point very firmly in that
direction.
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Boston bombs: Obama lulled America into
false confidence over terror threatThe war on terror cannot be
fought at an arm's length - and theattacks on Boston have brought
uncertainty back to American streets,writes Peter Foster.
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7/28/2019 Obama Lulled America Into False Confidence Over Terror
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Boston Marathon bombs: capture as it happened20 Apr 2013How
Boston awoke to a Hollywood battlezone19 Apr 2013Chechyna:
war-raved region that fell under jihadist spell19 Apr 2013Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev: a 'beautiful boy in a tux'19 Apr 2013Tamerlan Tsarnaev:
Boston bomb suspect profile19 Apr 2013
They bring home the complexity of the global Islamist threat
and the fact that it cannot be confined to wars in distant
lands,
or fought at arm's length using drones, as the Obama
administration has quietly yet insistently led America to
believe.
Mr Obama and his intelligence community know the threat
fromal-Qaeda affiliates, but have chosen to downplay it to the
US
public.
Even when that fight does directly touch on American lives,
as
it did last September when the US ambassador to Libya was
murdered in Benghazi by an al-Qaeda linked group, the
administration appears at pains to deny the connection.
Indeed, next week, America's transportation authority is to
relax
rules on carrying knives on planes for the first time since
theSeptember 11 attacks.
But as many counter-terrorism experts have been saying
their voices often drowned out or ignored in favour of the
pleasing simplicity of the Obama administration's narrative
the threat from al-Qaeda is too amorphous and shifting to
ever
have been discounted.
"They've fallen into the same trap that the Bush
administration
did early on," says Tom Jocelyn, a senior fellow at the
Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank who tracksthe
movements of high-value al-Qaeda targets.
"They define al-Qaeda as a hierarchical terrorist
organisation
such that if you kill 'x' number of leaders then the whole
thing
falls apart."
But the early information on the Tsarnaev brothers born in
Kyrgyzstan to a Chechen family, but living in the US for up to
a
decade points to just how blurred, in reality, the
distinctions
between al-Qaeda and its affiliates can become.
"It's a hybrid thing, that's the problem," says Aaron Zelin,
a
fellow at the Washington Institute forNear East Policy who
has
written extensively about the decentralisation of al-Qaeda.
"It's
a unique threat, there's nothing like it and that's why
people
have a hard time grasping what it is."
Looked at that way, Mr Obama's "confidence" and that of the
American public is likely to be badly shaken by what is
emerging from Boston.
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