Obama’s messy words
There is plenty of territory between the bloated and bellicose rhetoric of 2008 andwhat the US president is giving Americans now
There are things that you think and things that you say. There is what you reckon with privately and what you utter publicly. There are discussions suitable for a lecture hall and those that befit the bully pulpit. These sets overlap but are not the same. Has US President Barack Obama lost sight of that?
It is a question fairly asked after his statement last week that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for dealing with Islamic extremists in Syria. Not having a strategy, at least a fixed, definitive one, is understandable. The options are not great, the answers are not easy and the stakes are enormous. But announcing asmuch? It is hard to see any percentage in that. It gives no comfort to Americans. It puts no fear in America’s enemies. Just as curious was what Obama followed that upwith.
Speaking at a fundraiser last Friday, he told the donors: “If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart.” He had that much right. But it was not the whole of his message. In a statement of the obvious, he also said: “The world has always been messy.” And he coupled that with a needless comparison, advising Americans to bear in mind that the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ( Isil), the rapacity of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the bedlam in Libya and the rest of it were “not something that is comparable to the challenges we faced during the Cold War”.
Gut- twisting image
Set aside the question of how germane the example of the Cold War is. When the gut- twisting image stuck in your head is of a masked madman holding a crude knife to the neck of an American on his knees in the desert, when you are reading about crucifixions in the 21st century, when you are hearing about women sold by jihadists as sex slaves and when British leaders have just raised the threat level in their country to “severe”, the last thing that you want to be told is that it is par for the historical course — all a matter of perspective and not so cosmically dire.
Where is the reassurance — or the sense of urgency — in that?
Andmaybe the second- to- last thing that you want to be told is that technology and social media amplify peril in a new way and may be the reason you are feeling especially on edge. Obama said something along those lines, too. It is not the terror, folks. It is the tweets.
Is the president consoling us — or himself? It is as if he has taken his interior monologue and wired it to speakers in the town square. And it is rattling.
While this is all true and in tune with America’s awareness of its limits, it also reflects a prudent disinclination to repeat past mistakes and overreach. But that does not make it the right message for the world’s lone superpower ( whether Americans like it or not) to articulate and disseminate. That does not make it savvy, constructive PR. And the low marks that Americans currently give their president, especially for foreign policy, suggest that it is not exactly what theywere after.
‘ No- strategy’ remark
In the Washington Post last Sunday, Karen DeYoung and Dan Balz observed that while Obama’s no- strategy remark “may have had the virtue of candour”, it in no way projected “an image of presidential resolve or decisiveness at a time of international turmoil”.
And no matter what Obama ultimately elects to do, such an image is vital. But in its place are oratorical shrugs and an aura of hesitancy, even evasion, as he and US Secretary of State John Kerry broadcast that the US should not be expected to act on its own.
Isn’t that better whispered to America’s allies and negotiated behind closed doors? Echoing Hillary Clinton to some degree, Senator Dianne Feinstein just complained that Obamawas perhaps “too cautious”.
Not in what he says, he is not. Not when he draws and then erases red lines. Not with his recent adjectives. “Messy” is my kitchen at the end of a long weekend. What is happening in much of Syria and Iraq is monstrous.