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.

As a foreigner, I am sometimes mystified, and sometimes awed, by the radical consequences of the foundational freedoms in the U.S.. For instance, the freedom to say anything, including, to cite a recent Supreme Court decision, the freedom to hurl anti-gay slurs at mourners attending a funeral. Even such speech acts are protected under a firm system of liberties, the firmest that I know of. On the other hand, I am also bemused when friends at a restaurant divide the bill to exactly reflect what each one of the eaters has consumed, dollar by dollar, with due attention to the price of each and every item. A “depraved taste” for equality, de Tocqueville would say.

De Tocqueville argues that liberty and equality are always in tension in America; economic liberty, for example, may go against the principle of equality, as it often does. Or, vice versa, the push for equality may curtail some liberties. But the system, he adds, has built-in mechanisms designed to keep the needed equilibrium in place. Again, I am being schematic: of course the system is more complex and there is more to America’s history than the principles of equality and freedom.

My point is that Obama is right about the strength of this country. As Max Weber has demonstrated in his great comparative studies of the world religions and in his investigations of economy and society, ideas matter. The powerful Soviet empire collapsed not only under external forces, but primarily because its institutional order was based on unsustainable principles. The same can be said about right and left-wing dictatorships, which also tend toward instability and collapse. And also in the U.S, the basic political principles and ideas matter as they have proven to provide stable support for the institutional system, and thus underlie the country’s considerable strength.

With this in mind, let me follow Sherlock Holmes’s method and think like a terrorist. If it is true that ideas are the main strength of, arguably, the strongest country in the world, then, the terrorist’s primary targets should not be military, economic or infrastructural. They would have to be ideological. If de Tocqueville is correct, as most experts agree, the terrorist would focus his or her attacks on the principles of equality and liberty to erode the country’s institutional apparatus, to create unrest and systemic instability.

To accomplish this, the terrorist would have to target key decision-makers, beginning with the President and the members of Congress. The terrorist would try to encourage them to change the basic rules, t0 diminish the role of the judiciary, to suspend principles such as habeas corpus,  to undermine the fair treatment of presumed criminals and the humane treatment of actual criminals, and to undermine the principle that the country has to wage wars according to established rules and conventions. A goal of such an extremist would be for the U.S. to wage war following undemocratic means, fostering a sense that legality can be dispensed with. Another front of attack would involve freedom of expression and the free circulation of ideas. The terrorist would hope to increase the degree of policing and surveillance of private information. Executive capacities should be transferred to specialized branches in the military and to intelligence agencies, as dictatorships do. Freedom of worship should be dealt with also, preventing religious groups from houses of worship, for example.

For all this, the terrorist would have to enlist, above all, his or her most radical opponents. With their help, the terrorist can weaken the foundations of democratic practice and social order of America, turning the country against the very principles that sustain its distinctive social order.

Years ago, I would have been convinced that such a plan would be impossible, even ridiculous. But after George Bush, I began to wonder. And even under Obama, I am concerned.

A while ago, I read a frightening piece in The New York Times, on looted weapons in Libya. The hopeful side of the report is that the opposition to the brutal dictator (who has systematically attacked unarmed citizens) is militarily empowered, using the weapons of the dictatorial regime against the dictatorship. But the Times report emphasized the dangers. With arms now circulating outside the formal control of the state, there is a high likelihood that some of them will reach the black market and get into the hands of terrorists outside this zone of conflict. C.J. Chives, the Times reporter examines particularly this dangerous side of recent events there.

Indeed it’s scary. Nihilists of various sorts might obtain missiles that are capable of attacking commercial airliners. As someone who often flies abroad for professional and family purposes, I am particularly concerned. This security threat is very real, Chives reports, because in relatively recent past examples of state arsenals being looted by civilians, Uganda in 1979, Albania in 1997 and Iraq in 2003, the fear has been confirmed.

When I was reading this article, I thought about another circumstance when such fear in the end seems to have proven unfounded, and in which I was peripherally involved. The collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989 led many to worry that terrorists, who had been armed and supported by the Soviet bloc, would become rogue and free floating. Further, there was the fear that their preferred weapons, sophisticated plastic explosives, specifically semtex, might be used in new ways, not disciplined by the logic of the cold war. It was in this context that I became a suspected terrorist.

I was coming home from a two month trip around the old Soviet bloc in the late winter of 1990. This visit would later become the basis of my theoretical travelogue, After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe. I met colleagues in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, what would become the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union, specifically Leningrad. I was on a mission to lend support to those who sought to develop new curricula in the social sciences, and meeting with democratic oppositionists of various sorts, some who were advancing the constitution of new democracies, others, who still had a long way to go. In Poland and Hungary, a new stability was already apparent, while in Leningrad there had been little change. In Sofia, a week before I arrived, the Communist Party headquarters across the street from my hotel had burned down. I spent part of my time with an opposition group in a demonstration for democratic change. In Bucharest, I saw the militia brutally beating people on Victory Square. I had no understanding of who was being brutalized and why they were being attacked. It was a tough trip.

My last stop was Leningrad, an odd stay where I went to explore the possibility of developing a cooperative relationship with a group purporting to be an independent institution of higher learning. Two representatives of the group had approached, through a State Department contact, the New School president, Jonathan Fanton. We had initial discussions in New York, which raised some doubts about the real standing of this endeavor. I went to Leningrad to check things out, quickly discovering that they were charlatans. But I had to hang around for two days, giving lectures that the two were using to enhance their local authority, meeting very interesting people at the Academy of Sciences under very strange circumstances. A number of them gave me letters and parcels to send to American colleagues, thus, avoiding the Soviet censors. As an old Soviet bloc veteran, this was completely normal, contrasting the continuation of Soviet ways with the rapid changes occurring in Central Europe.

My departure was on Aeroflot to Stockholm and from there on American Airlines to New York. U.S. carriers were then under a terrorist alert in the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing, coupled with the fear of rogue terrorists. Because of this, there was an additional security review before entering the waiting room for American flights. When the security guards reviewed my passport, I was taken to another room and an interrogation began. I fit a profile. I look Jewish, but also vaguely Middle Eastern, Mediterranean. I was traveling over an eight week period around the region, saturated with suspected rogue terrorists. Over the past ten years I had been in and out of the region, particularly in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, actually as an observer and collaborator of the democratic oppositions, but the quick review of my passport, of course, didn’t reveal that. The questioning went on for about an hour. For forty-five minutes, I was a suspected terrorist. But my answers to their questions made sense and as the questioning proceeded the tone changed. They became more interested in who I met, whether I was inadvertently carrying a package that might be dangerous. Because I had the Russian letters and packages, the flight was delayed to do a thorough examination of my luggage.

That settled, the rest of my flight home was a pleasure. The security officials apologized for the inconvenience they caused me. My seat was upgraded from coach to business class. Even during the interrogation, I was at all points treated with courtesy. And I have often wondered since 9/11 why all profile searches couldn’t be conducted in this fashion. Search, verify, respect, and compensate for the inconvenience.

Because the demands of the academic cycle, because of the challenge of term papers, dissertations and dissertation proposals, I am late this week in this review. But now that I have a few moments this Sunday evening, I can make a few points, noting that all week we have been concerned about the difficult relationship between words and deeds.

If there were any deed which would be clearly and unambiguously a candidate for automatic verbal condemnation, it would seem to be slavery, but this is not the case. Narvaez shows, choosing the extreme case to make his very important point, judging the unacceptable requires a capacity for moral indignation. He worries that with the noise of infotainment, of cable television, web surfing and social networking, the capacity to express indignation is waning. On the other hand, Gary Alan Fine, in his reply to Narvaez, seems to be as concerned with the direction of such indignation as its presence or absence. Condemnations of Israel, for example, sometimes come too easily from the left and the Arab world, and they can be manufactured, as Daniel Dayan shows in his post this week.

This was an exciting and provocative exchange. I think Narvaez in his response to Fine revealed how sound public debate yields results when it is specific. Small things, details, make all the difference. Not moral indignation about Israeli atrocities, but a specific atrocity, the complicity in the massacre in Sabra and Shatila, for example. And Narvaez is surely right, democracy requires such indignation. The jaded society is a clear and present danger to democracy, explaining for example broad American acceptance of torture of political prisoners as long as it goes by the Orwellian name of “enhanced interrogation.”

And paying close attention to the relationship between words and deeds applies as well to the persistent problem of fictoids in our public life, as we discussed last year. Little tales that confirm preconceived notions of the truth, blissfully without regard to their facticity: Obama the Kenyan post-colonial non citizen, Newt Gingrich, the man who divorced his first wife while she was hospitalized on her death bed. Gary Alan Fine explains why such stories are too good to not be believed. I, influenced by Hannah Arendt, add that to base our politics on such fabrications is extremely dangerous, reminiscent of the horrors of totalitarian practice, perhaps now as a joke, but serious nonetheless.

Daniel Dayan’s post this week demonstrates that he is a student of his great teacher Roland Barthes. In a compressed mediation, he compares the power of two recent radical events in North Africa and the Middle East. Without explicitly supporting or condemning either, the terrorist attack on a café in Marrakesh and the flotilla directed against the Israeli blockade in Gaza, he shows what each could and could not accomplish. He shows how, through theater, deeds speak. In my terms, he shows why “the politics of small things” is more powerful than terrorism. I was blown away by Dayan’s contribution. It would be great if we could further explore this in the coming weeks.

And then there was the power of words that President Obama unleashed in his speech on North Africa and the Middle East. I was impressed. The speech was better than I thought it would be. It actually got the serious potential consequential debate going again. Tomorrow, Gershon Shafir will present his careful commentary on how he thinks the speech moves the Israelis and Palestinians forward.

An additional note from me for now: I wrote my piece concerned that Obama would give an attractive speech that would be presented artfully and be pleasant to hear, but would prove to be inconsequential, like the speeches of a President of a Central European new democracy, not getting involved in the nitty-gritty of tough politics. But that is not what happened, evident in two ways. Netanyahu was given the opportunity to be a historic figure, to actually move toward peace now, and he angrily refused. And Republican candidates and office holders abdicated their responsibilities and played foolish politics.

Obama gave a careful speech on the American relationship to the promise of the Arab Spring, and he quite diplomatically tried to nudge Israelis and Palestinians forward to serious negotiations by saying publicly what has been the first commitment of all parties of the peace process for decades: “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.” The practical consequence of this is yet to be seen.

But an important theoretical point was revealed, a mirror image of what Dayan shows in his post. Dayan’s analysis showed that deeds speak. Obama politics revealed that speech acts.