Obama's audacious claim: U.S. is retooling foreign policy from a position of strength

Back in December 2008, in an interview with Time's Richard Stengel, Obama set for himself what struck me as a "modest and ambitious agenda" to make a significant beginning on several long-term challenges.  I posited in early 2012 that he'd done reasonably well by his own yardstick.

In an interview airing on NPR today, Obama set himself an ambitious set of benchmarks in a narrower range: not foreign policy per se, but the legal and ethical framework in which foreign policy -- and military action -- is formed and executed.  Here's the agenda:

On his foreign policy goals before leaving office:
 
"I'm going to keep on pushing because I want to make sure that when I turn the keys over to the next president, that they have the ability, that he or she has the capacity to — to make some decisions with a relatively clean slate.

"Closing Guantanamo is one. Making sure that we have the right legal architecture for how we conduct counterterrorism and that there's greater transparency, as I discussed today, that's another.

Two ways of looking at a Hellfire

Leah Farrall, a former intelligence analyst for the Australian federal police and current Ph.D. student, muses:

In regard’s to Jarret [Brachman]’s comment about ensuring hellfire missiles rain down, I’d point out that this is exactly what al Qaeda wants. I wrote about this in relation to Afghanistan in an op-ed I wrote for the Australian last year.  The same risk is present in dealing with AQAP, especially in Yemen.  They want a reaction, they want those hellfire missiles because they want a jihad.  Of course they aren’t likely to come out and say this, but at the end of the day their  attacks don’t give them that jihad, our reaction does.  That is, attacks are primarily designed to provoke a reaction, just like any other terrorist group. A reaction then provides legitimacy because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  On that note I’d, point out that  armed responses to al Qaeda have, throughout the organisation’s history, generated far more recruits than its attacks or its propaganda efforts.

In a different post, Farrall points to a piece "well worth reading" by Pakistani columnist Irfan Husain, who retails the claims of a scholar, Farhat Taj, who is native to Waziristan and claims that the people there welcome U.S. drone attacks: