Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American National Security is a new collection published by Encounter Books to mark the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States. In it, former Bush administration officials and other experts provocatively confront questions about our future on the national-security front. Among them is John Yoo, former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice and a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who serves as editor, with Dean Reuter, of the collection. Yoo talks to National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about the anniversary, the record, the future, and more.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: To start with, do you see what’s happening in Libya and maybe Syria in any 9/11 continuum?

JOHN YOO: Yes I do. While there is a legitimate debate over whether the Bush administration’s Freedom Agenda was worth the cost, I think that events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya show that the underlying strategy was sound. The short-term strategy for terrorism is to make the homeland more secure and to go after al-Qaeda leaders and their safe havens. The longer-term strategy was to drain the swamp in the Middle East that created the nihilistic ideology behind al-Qaeda — just as victory in the Cold War was a combination of military containment of the Soviet Union plus demonstrating the moral and economic bankruptcy of Communism. The Arab Spring could be the ultimate crippling blow to al-Qaeda — it is not a relevant political player anymore. If young Arab men without futures in the Middle East want to change the world, they don’t have to blow themselves up. They can now work for positive political change in their own countries. Bush started this long-term strategy on his watch, but it is Obama who has to manage it and may well benefit more from it.

LOPEZ: You are very hard on Janet Napolitano in Confronting Terror. Seriously, that office covers a lot of ground. You’re going to hold that system responsible for a near-miss Christmas attack?

YOO: The Department of Homeland Security no doubt has hard-working public servants doing their best to protect America from attack, but the department itself was a poor idea — it is trying to do too many different jobs and had to waste a lot of time and resources melding multiple, different agencies into a large expensive bureaucracy. So a loss of focus was inevitable. But it was compounded by the agenda of its leadership under the Obama administration, which bizarrely thought of terrorist attacks as “man-caused disasters” and viewed returning veterans as a potential right-wing extremist threat. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda dramatically increased its efforts to launch attacks within the country, and a combination of a vigilant public and good luck has saved us from blown-up airliners in Detroit or car bombs in Times Square.

LOPEZ: Is it fair to give the president grief on national security? Do you know what the Bush administration left him with? And then there was the Arab Spring and the earthquake in Japan and . . .

YOO: I believe that Obama should be judged first and foremost on national security — protecting the nation is the chief responsibility of every American president. He has had challenges, but that is why the Framers created a vigorous, independent executive office, and why we hope we elect men and women of experience and good judgment to the office. What we shouldn’t do is accept complaining of the “woe is me” variety — if Obama feels life has been unfair, he shouldn’t have run for office. Reagan, for example, came to office in the depths of a recession and out-of-control inflation, opposed by a Soviet enemy armed with thousands of nuclear weapons and seeking to undermine the United States at every turn. I don’t remember Reagan complaining about being dealt a tough hand. In fact, Americans will admire presidents who rise to tough challenges with “energy in the executive,” as The Federalist Papers put it.

LOPEZ: “National security amounted to an afterthought,” you say about Barack Obama’s State of the Union addresses. But is that much different from the GOP debates we have been watching thus far in the 2012 primary season?

YOO: I admit that I am concerned about the lack of attention to national-security affairs in the Republican primary so far. But I attribute that to the consensus that appears to be taking shape among the candidates: Don’t gut defense just to mechanically balance the budget; restore full powers to our intelligence and military officers fighting the War on Terror; leave Afghanistan and Iraq only when we have neutralized the terrorist threat; counterbalance the rise of China. If the candidates agree on these principles, then they should define the differences between them on domestic policy, where Obama is most vulnerable, and for good reason.

LOPEZ: Do you worry about the “war fatigue” — the relative few who have personal ties to the wars we’re in, the lack of focus, especially during a campaign season?

YOO: I am not so worried about it. What has impressed me the most has been the constancy of the American people. They have seen the job through in Iraq, once we had a strategy to prevail. I believe that the nation will support the military’s strategy of following through in Afghanistan, despite President Obama’s gesture to his left-wing base to pull out precipitously. It has been ten long, hard years, and the American people, I think, have been remarkable in their support of the war against al-Qaeda and efforts to remake the Middle East.

LOPEZ: Would Democrats still hold the House if the president had transformed the presidency “from a check into a facilitator of Congress”?

YOO: No. If Obama had performed his constitutional role and checked his own party from wrecking the economy and imposing unprecedented regulatory burdens on its recovery, plus creating the mother of all entitlements with health care, the American people would not have so soundly rebuked his party in the 2010 elections. Sometimes good constitutional principles even translate into good politics.

LOPEZ: “The presidency was meant to be weak at home and strong abroad,” you write. Even at economic times such as these?

YOO: Yes, maybe even especially now. Our system was designed to make it difficult for us to engage in sweeping, radical changes in domestic policy. And in the absence of federal action, the states were supposed to regulate most affairs in life, and the bias should be against any government action so that individual liberty and free markets — which are the only ways to produce economic growth — can flourish. If the constitutional plan had been followed, the Obama administration would not have pressed forward on the explosion of the federal deficit; wild, unthinking spending programs; and Obamacare. Instead, we would have had more cautious, incremental changes that would have let the economy heal itself through the American genius for hard work, innovation, and free enterprise.

We’ve seen this movie before. FDR tried sweeping, radical reforms to combat the Great Depression, but they didn’t work — the economy only experienced sustained growth with the coming of World War II. Obama learned the wrong lesson from FDR. Instead of trying his own version of the New Deal, he should have focused on foreign affairs and tried to lessen, not increase, government control of the domestic economy.

LOPEZ: So while President Obama compares himself to President Lincoln, is he really Jefferson? And Eisenhower?

YOO: He is a failed version of Jefferson, in that he tried to overcome the Constitution’s separation of powers and coordinate the president and Congress into a common platform — and just as Jefferson’s domestic programs stalled, so too have Obama’s. In foreign policy he is like Eisenhower, in that at best he has kept the fundamental architecture of Bush counterterrorism, though he hasn’t done it willingly. But he is beginning, I am afraid, to follow the worst examples of Kennedy: His weakness in national security is inviting aggressive action by our foes abroad.

LOPEZ: Is the president MIA on “critical wartime decisions”?

YOO: I’m afraid that Obama’s instincts tend to follow the left wing of his party, and he doesn’t seem to have a true, comprehensive strategy for foreign affairs. He seems to do his best just to push off decisions, to hope that foreign problems will go away — witness his approach to the Arab Spring, Iran, North Korea, and China — and spend his time trying to intervene in the domestic economy. His approval ratings have fallen below 40 percent for a reason — not just for unpopularity, but in spite of his popularity, because Americans sense that he is doing more harm than good at home, and he is inviting danger through neglect of the world abroad.

LOPEZ: Do people still view you as the “torture” guy?

YOO: I suppose it is something that people will always think of. But I have no regrets. It was my duty to make these difficult choices, and I also think it is my responsibility to explain why we approved policy in the Bush administration and what the benefits and costs were. The last thing I would ever want to do is leave the men and women in the field, who risk their lives protecting all of us, hanging in the wind because the policymakers back home refuse to defend their decisions. I won’t let that happen.

LOPEZ: How do you survive at Berkeley?

YOO: As you know, for conservatives I am a shining beacon for free markets, free minds, and free men and women, surrounded by a sea of Marxism. In other words, I am like West Berlin during the Cold War. Of course, many of the students have no idea what West Berlin was anymore.

LOPEZ: What do you make of the whole Guantanamo Bay issue?

YOO: As long as there is a War on Terror, there will always have to be someplace to hold terrorists. It could be at Gitmo, but even if the U.S. closes Gitmo, it will need the same facility, no matter where it is or what it is called. What was bizarre about the Obama administration was not just that they wanted to close Gitmo, but that they viewed the whole thing as a jobs program for Obama’s home state — transferring al-Qaeda leaders to an unused Illinois prison. Gitmo also shows the way that Congress can constrain the president in foreign affairs — not by trying to issue its own orders about how to fight, but by refusing to fund a new detention facility in the U.S. and keeping Gitmo open.

LOPEZ: No one really raises the issue you do in this book: that we kill more terrorists now. It’s ironic, because people probably think Cheney singlehandedly would have done that. But not having a place for detainees does create an issue, doesn’t it? Is Gitmo actually the humane policy?

YOO: The far Left’s fetishism toward Gitmo has actually produced worse results for human rights. Before Obama ended all CIA interrogations and announced that he would not add any more detainees to Gitmo, al-Qaeda leaders were captured, interrogated, and held at a facility that is as good as or better than any prison in the United States. Now, because Obama won’t capture and interrogate al-Qaeda leaders — the most valuable source of intelligence in this shadowy war — he is reduced to killing them outright. This not only deprives the al-Qaeda leaders of their most precious human right — life — but it also kills innocent family members and civilians in the blast zones. This makes the Obama administration happy because it doesn’t have to grapple with the hard questions of detention, but it actually harms our national security by drying up the most vital source of intelligence on enemy plots to attack us. And it is a greater deprivation of human rights.

LOPEZ: “We can only hope,” you write, “that Obama will have the courage to pursue a more serious counterterrorism policy in the rest of his term.” Are you holding your breath, especially now that we’re in full campaign mode?

YOO: I still have my hopes that Obama will realize that his greatest support from the American people has come when he has made the brave decisions in foreign affairs, such as the operation to kill bin Laden, to surge troops in Afghanistan, and to maintain the withdrawal schedule in Iraq. He has to realize that he is only losing votes in the middle when he seeks to close Gitmo and try 9/11 plotters such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City with all of the rights due to an American citizens on trial for a garden-variety crime. If he wants to rush back into the arms of the anti-war Left of his party, he will lose. In this case, good policy will make good politics.

LOPEZ: You want him to be more like FDR? Don’t you worry about the wrong lessons’ being taken there?

YOO: I want him to be like FDR circa 1940, not FDR circa 1933. I think FDR’s New Deal saddled us with a distortion of the Constitution’s limits on the federal government and the separation of powers; federal intrusion into state affairs; and an unwieldy, bloated, ineffective bureaucracy. And the result was not an end to the Great Depression. But by 1940, FDR realized that he had to reorient his presidency toward protecting the United States from the fascist threats in Europe and Asia. Dr. New Deal became Dr. Win-the-War. And it was at that moment that FDR changed from a mediocre into a great president. I think that Obama should exercise the powers of his office broadly, but to lead the nation against its foreign enemies, not to remake American society.

#AD#LOPEZ: What do you consider President Bush’s most important post-9/11 decision?

YOO: His very first and most important decision was to treat the 9/11 attacks as an act of war, and not, as administrations of both parties had done for decades, to consider terrorism a crime.

LOPEZ: What has been President Obama’s best decision?

YOO: Going ahead with the operation to kill bin Laden, despite the risks of failure and the chance of offending the Pakistanis. But he would have done better to capture bin Laden and interrogate him instead. We lost a treasure trove of intelligence that could have allowed us to finally plunge a stake into al-Qaeda.

LOPEZ: What do you remember most about 9/11?

YOO: I remember two things. First, learning on the morning of 9/11 that my good friend Barbara Olson was killed in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, and that she’d had the calm, fighting spirit to call in to the Justice Department to warn them about the hijacking and to ask for instructions. Second, after spending the day and night at my Justice Department office working on the legal implications of considering the 9/11 attacks an act of war, driving across the bridge from D.C. into Virginia and seeing the Pentagon, on fire, lighting up the night sky. I thought I would never live to see the day when an enemy succeeded in setting one of the great buildings of our government on fire.

LOPEZ: Do you have a favorite essay in the book?

YOO: The most moving essay is the first one in the volume by Ted Olson. It is his speech in honor of his wife, killed in the attack on the Pentagon, written two months after the attacks. I think any American, no matter his views of the Bush and Obama policies, will be proud of Barbara and the way she fought our enemy until the very end, and of Ted, for continuing as one of us, the living, to defend our nation in the years afterward.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.