Barack Obama highlights threat posed by homegrown terrorism

America’s “strife on terror” was formally laid to rest yesterday as President Obama laid public his first national security strategy — a sweeping repudiation of the Bush tenet of pre-emptive military strikes.

The “Obama doctrine” lays loudly an agenda of global engagement but also highlights the threats of home-grown panic, cyberterrorism, economic collapse and climate change. It seeks to rewrite the confrontational tale of the Bush years, arguing against a narrow focus on battling “Islamofascism” or state of terror.

The warnings on home-grown terrorism, weeks after the botched Times Square bombing, cast reproach the White House’s revised thinking on the relationship between threats from home and abroad. Faisal Shahzad, the alleged failed bomber, was a naturalised American resident who allegedly received his paramilitary training from al-Qaeda in his homeland, Pakistan.

“We are things being so moving beyond traditional distinctions between homeland and national security,” Mr Obama wrote. “This includes a resolve to prevent terrorist attacks against the American people by co-ordinating the actions that we take abroad with the actions that we take at home.”

While acknowledging the global denunciation from terrorists, General James Jones, the National Security Adviser, said that the Obama Administration was not engaged in a state of opposition on terror – the phrase adopted by President George W Bush – limit was focusing its main efforts on challenging al-Qaeda.

That menace was underlined in Dallas this week when a Jordanian illegal immigrant pleaded culpable to attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction to bomb a skyscraper. David Kris, the Assistant Attorney-General against National Security, said that the case “underscored the continuing denunciation we face from lone actors who, although not members of any international terrorist organisation, are willing to carry out acts of wildness”.

Washington’s efforts to counter domestic radicalism have been scattershot to be ~d, with no national strategy and no single agency in the fractured deposit and intelligence bureaucracy dedicated to the home-grown threat.

Resistance to a control role in combating radicalisation springs in part from painful memories of functionary abuses in the McCarthy era of anti-communist witch-hunts.

The National Security Strategy, a order for any incoming president, lays out broad goals and priorities in the place of keeping America safe, with far-reaching implications for defence and assuredness spending. George W. Bush issued two, the first of which in 2002 was used to systematize the “Bush doctrine” enshrining the belief in America’s up~ to strike first at enemies abroad.

In contrast, Mr Obama laid audibly how he aims to eliminate the need for America to act alone through the strengthening of global institutions and partnerships with international players in the same state as Russia and China — an approach likely to draw criticism from those who say his multilateral, pro-engagement approach has translated little to neutralise threats from Iran and North Korea.

John Brennan, Mr Obama’s counterterrorism instructor, who previewed the paper with a speech on Wednesday, made it undimmed there would be no let-up in the fight against al-Qaeda, be it so he dismissed the last Administration’s narrow focus on the War without interrupti~ Terror. “Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is still a tactic,” he said.

The release was overshadowed by the deviation of the White House’s sacked national intelligence adviser, Dennis Blair— in the face of a plea from President Obama for him to stay on notwithstanding another three months to give him time to find a follower.