John Brennan - Tag Search

John Brennan, Barack Obama's counterterrorism adviser, thinks the U.S. government needs to strengthen what he calls "moderate" elements within Hizballah.

"Hezbollah is a very interesting organization," Brennan told a Washington conference. "There is certainly the elements of Hezbollah that are truly a concern to us what they're doing. And what we need to do is to find ways to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to build up the more moderate elements," Brennan said.

The White House denied just last month that it was planning to engage Hizballah, and you might remember the absurd flap earlier this year over Rob Malley (a former U.S. official) holding low-level talks with Hamas.

It's Sunday afternoon and I should probably be watching football, but this Cowboys-Redskins game was so dreadfully boring that I found myself reading about Yemen instead.

I imagine the Obama administration is starting to think about a "Yemen policy" (if it hasn't already). The country is making headlines because of the insurgency in the north and an ongoing problem with al-Qaeda, which reportedly kidnapped a Japanese engineer last week (though the Yemeni government denies this report). And Yemen is also starting to get some attention on the D.C. think-tank circuit -- most recently from the Center for a New American Security, which published a paper on Yemen last week.

Against that backdrop, it's worth asking a fundamental question: Just how much can the U.S. hope to influence events in Yemen? The answer, I think, is "not much at all."

Most of you by now have heard the outlines of Brennan's speech, which you can read in its entirety here on The Majlis. Brennan put a nail in the coffin of the "global war on terror," or at least that particular terminology, and gave probably the most thorough outline of President Obama's holistic counterterrorism views, which we got a taste of throughout the 2008 presidential campaign and in Obama's much-ballyhooed Cairo speech.

So knowing the gist of Brennan's comments, let's start with some caveats:

John Brennan, an adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama on counterterrorism, gave a speech yesterday on the "war on terrorism" at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. Evan's working on a more detailed analysis of the speech, which made some interesting arguments and offered a new approach for U.S. counterterrorism policy.

For now, you can take a look at the full text of Brennan's speech, posted after the jump.