I believe that the disclosures concerning the surveillance of phone records and internet communications in the Guardian and The Washington Post underscore the significance of President Obama’s recent speech on national security. His words provide the most cogent means to appraise his responsibilities for his administration’s actions. Today an analysis of the speech and the responses to it: in my next post, I will reflect on its significance in light of recent events. -Jeff

In his address to the National Defense University on May 23, 2013, President Obama set out to transform the common sense about terrorism and the proper American response to it. He continued what I take to be his major goal: the reinvention of American political culture, pushing the center left on a broad range of problems and principles, often meeting great resistance. In this particular instance, the change he sought at NDU, was apparently quite simple, moving from a war on terror to a struggle against terrorists, ending the prospect of total and endless war against an enemy whose power has been greatly and routinely exaggerated. The suggestion of the simple change understandably elicited strong and conflicting reactions. I think these reactions, along with the speech itself, illuminate the significance of Obama’s latest performance as “storyteller-in-chief.”

The editorial board of The New York Times declared:

“President Obama’s speech on Thursday was the most important statement on counterterrorism policy since the 2001 attacks, a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America.” 

Over on the op.ed. page a few days later, Ross Douthat presented a cynical alternative:

“President Obama’s speech national security last week was a dense thicket of self-justifying argument, but its central message was perfectly clear: Please don’t worry, liberals. I’m not George W. Bush.”

At The New York Review of Books, David Cole judged:

“President Barack Obama’s speech Thursday at the National Defense University (NDU) may turn out to be the most significant of his tenure,”

and observed:

“Obama might have chosen to speak more cautiously in his NDU speech. Instead, he went much further, outlining a way out of this ‘perpetual war,’ saying that ‘our democracy demands it.’ Whether he can make good on this promise will very likely define his legacy. If he succeeds in doing so, the Nobel Peace Prize committee will be seen not as naïve, but as remarkably prescient, in its awarding of the Peace Prize to Obama in 2009.”

I agree, but many observers, left, right and in between don’t, including, I suspect many Deliberately Considered readers. There have been strong dissenting positions, some quite cogent.

From the right

Newt Gingrich:

“I thought the president’s speech was astonishingly naïve and a sign that he hasn’t read much history…”[Obama] wants to somehow rise above the big government scandals that are gradually drowning his administration…He wants to look like he’s forward looking, engaged, etcetera … But the truth is, what he announced and explained was almost meaningless.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.):

“What do you think the Iranians are thinking? At the end of the day, this is the most tone-deaf president I ever could imagine, making such a speech at a time when our homeland is trying to be attacked literally every day.”

And Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) concluded Obama’s speech:

“will be viewed by terrorists as a victory.”

From the left

Glenn Greenwald is convinced that the speech said nothing:

“his speech had something for everyone, which is another way of saying that it offered nothing definitive or even reliable about future actions.”

Benjamin Wittes was even more critical:

“If there was a unifying theme of President Obama’s speech today at the National Defense University, it was an effort to align himself as publicly as possible with the critics of the positions his administration is taking without undermining his administration’s operational flexibility in actual fact. To put it crassly, the president sought to rebuke his own administration for taking the positions it has—but also to make sure that it could continue to do so.”

Oddly, Ron Paul seems to have judged Obama most harshly from the dovish side:

“The speech speaks of more war and more killing and more interventionism all masked in the language of withdrawal.”

His was libertarian reading:

“President Obama’s speech is not at all what it seems. It is a call for more empire and more power to the executive branch. The president promises that ‘this war, like all wars, must end.’ Unfortunately the war on the American taxpayer never seems to end. But end it will, as we are running out of money.” 

These are strong judgments, apparently determined more by the identity, interests and commitments of the judges than the judged speech. Then again, perhaps Greenwald is right, the alternative judgments could be a function of Obama’s qualities as a politician, able to fulfill the wishes of his supporters and opponents alike.

Yet, I think it is more than this. Obama’s speech is a part of his overall project. He is trying to move common sense away from the assumption of a permanent state of war. The relationship between rhetoric and action is at issue, i.e. our political culture, and the rhetoric clearly was being changed. It was not mere rhetoric.

This was not one of Obama’s beautiful speeches. Rather it was lawyerly, making a case, justifying his administrations policies to date, suggesting immediate and future changes. There are problems.

With his critics, I worry about his drone policies, about lethal attacks outside of war zones. I note that the drone attacks have decreased of late, and that in this speech, he gives a more restricted account of when and how the attacks should proceed, significantly with oversight. But I also note that this was all pretty vague.

I believe with his critics, including Medea Benjamin, the Code Pink activist who disrupted the speech, that the President could probably have done more to realize his stated goal of closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and it is far from clear, after the speech, how hard he will push now.

And I worry about the administration’s relationship with the press and its policies on leaks. As a father of a journalist, it was good to hear the President declare: “Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs.” Yet, I am still concerned by the Obama administrations aggressive policies toward leaks.

Yes, there are reasons to not just applaud the speech. But applaud, I will, because of the fundamental turn Obama made in the speech. He clarified how he understands the threat we now face, and he drew the logical conclusion. The era of permanent war is now over. The post 9/11 Orwellian Winter is coming to an end. Thus spoke the President:

“[T]he current threat — lethal yet less capable al Qaeda affiliates; threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad; homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism. We have to take these threats seriously, and do all that we can to confront them. But as we shape our response, we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.

In the 1980s, we lost Americans to terrorism at our Embassy in Beirut; at our Marine Barracks in Lebanon; on a cruise ship at sea; at a disco in Berlin; and on a Pan Am flight — Flight 103 — over Lockerbie. In the 1990s, we lost Americans to terrorism at the World Trade Center; at our military facilities in Saudi Arabia; and at our Embassy in Kenya. These attacks were all brutal; they were all deadly; and we learned that left unchecked, these threats can grow. But if dealt with smartly and proportionally, these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11.

We must define our effort not as a boundless “global war on terror,” but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”

This is prose not poetry, but crucial. For those on Obama’s left, the significance of this change in official policy may not be perceptible. Obama is trying to get done what they take for granted. But he knows, what they ignore, that a broad fearful public has been convinced by the war metaphor of “the war on terrorism” and that a significant faction of the political establishment is committed to the metaphor. They have to be moved if we are really to move beyond a dark moment in American history, epitomized by the claim that torture was effective “enhanced interrogation.” Obama is doing the moving.

Gingrich, Saxby and Graham, et al, see what Obama is up to, and as with much else, they are engaging in a counterattack. They recognize that big changes are being initiated, and they will do all they can to stop them from happening.

Although there are good reasons to wonder about the detailed connection between the promise of Obama’s speech and the practice of the Obama administration, it is important to nonetheless recognize that a big political change is going on. I think this is a way to understand and criticize recent revelations concerning government surveillance.

I have long been intrigued by the distance between principle and practice, how people respond to the distance, and what the consequences are, of the distance and the response. This was my major concern in The Cynical Society. It is central to “the civil society as if” strategy of the democratic opposition that developed around the old Soviet bloc, which I explored in Beyond Glasnost and After the Fall. And it is also central to how I think about the politics of small things and reinventing political culture, including many of my own public engagements: from my support of Barack Obama, to my understanding of my place of work, The New School for Social Research and my understanding of this experiment in publication, Deliberately Considered. I will explain in a series of posts. Today a bit more about Obama and his Nobel Lecture, and the alternative to cynicism.

I think principle is every bit as real as practice. Therefore, in my last post, I interpreted Obama’s lecture as I did. But I fear my position may not be fully understood. A friend on Facebook objected to the fact that I took the lecture seriously. “The Nobel Address marked the Great Turn Downward, back to Cold War policies a la Arthur Schlesinger Jr. et al. A big depressing moment for many of us.”

He sees many of the problems I see in Obama’s foreign policy, I assume, though he wasn’t specific. He is probably quite critical of the way the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have continued, critical of the drone policy, disappointed by the fact that Guantanamo prison is still open, and by Obama’s record on transparency and the way he has allowed concern for national security take priority over human and civil rights, at home and abroad. The clear line between Bush’s foreign policy and Obama’s, which both my friend and I sought, has not been forthcoming. And he draws a logical conclusion: “a great turn downward.”

My friend sees a familiar failure: militarism wrapped in an elegant intellectual package (the reference to Schlesinger). In the distance between perceived principled promise and practice, “the best and the brightest” seem to be at it again: sophisticated rationalization for militarism reminiscent of the Cold War and its ideology, He sees the distance between the ideal and the practice as proof that the professed ideal was a sham. Perhaps he even makes the cynical move that the fancy words are but a mask for narrow self-interest (election and re-election) serving the interest of the powerful (the neo-liberal corporate elite). Is Obama’s advancement just about serving the interests of the hegemonic corporate order? Is their advancement linked directly to his serving their interests. Are the two primary cynical observations I studied in The Cynical Society all there is? It’s not what you know but who you know, and they’re all in it for themselves.

I, when I wrote my book and now, judge the ideal more independently, connected to practice to be sure, but connected not only in a cynical way, but also connected to the possibility of critique, a way to empower critical practice. Cynicism is the opposite of criticism, a major theme of my book. And now I read the Nobel lecture with this starting point. The lecture provides a guide to critically appraise Obama and his policies, and it provides the grounds upon which to critically respond to the shortcomings of the policies. As I put it in the post: “The Nobel Laureate Obama as critic of President Obama.”

I see no reason to take the flawed actions of the Obama administration as being somehow more real than the professed complex ideals expressed in the Nobel lecture. Action and ideal interact in an important and consequential ways that suggest future possibility.

Yesterday I read a piece, “Obama’s Drone Debacle.” It reports that the drone policy has been more determined by career bureaucrats in the national security establishment than by the President and his White House. “It’s clear that the president and the attorney general both want more transparency,” says Matthew Miller, a former senior Justice Department official. “But the bureaucracy has once again thrown sand in the gears and slowed that down.” This does not relieve Obama of the responsibility for his policies, but it suggests an ongoing battle within the administration that may yield a change in direction. The article cynically highlights that Rand Paul outmaneuvered Obama in his filibuster of John Brennan’s nomination to lead the CIA. This is “Obama’s debacle.” The Nobel lecture reveals the thought behind possible change.

Am I again just apologizing for the politician I admire? Perhaps, but I think there is more to it than that. For even as I am critical with my friend of directions Obama has taken, I see a leader trying to move the public and not just making empty gestures of change. I see a complicated ideal being kept alive and shaping foreign policy to a degree, if not enough for my friend and others with similar criticisms. The U.S. surely is disengaging from the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq more quickly with Obama, than we would have with either McCain or Romney. American foreign policy is moving away from extreme militarism that Obama’s Republican opponents proposed as a matter of principle. Principles matter.

And lastly the general point, without the ideal publicly visible, there is next to no chance that it will be acted upon. I saw and reported how this animated practice in the Polish underground. It explains why I think America is not only “the cynical society” but also a democratic society, simultaneously, with democratic ideals moving action, even as manipulation and cynicism are rampant. And more close to my intellectual home, it is why The New School for Social Research is a very special institution of higher education and scholarship, even when it has faced profound challenges and has been undermined by less than enlightened leadership for long periods of time. That will be the subject of my next “Principle and Practice” post.