Rhetoric and Reality: Countering Terrorism in the Age of Obama

sale changes to US counterterrorism policy, however, misread Obama's intentions. Obama always 2 See e.g. 'Obama's remarks on Iraq and Afghanistan', New York Times, 15 July , As this article will emphasize, political realities have.
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As he noted in Oslo:. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people … Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

Yet Obama did not believe that an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan was an option he could consider, given the policies and strategy set in place by his predecessor. Do we need to defeat the Taliban? They will be useful in this coalition. However, Biden also made clear that in return for the new tone and approach of the Obama administration, the US would expect more from its partners.

It is not only the war in Afghanistan that has exposed the dilemmas Obama faces. On a range of issues, from climate change to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and the challenges posed by Iran and North Korea, Obama has often found himself having to compromise. As Zbigniew Bzrezinski argued in early He has done this remarkably well. In less than a year, he has comprehensively reconceptualized U.

Climate change was one such issue, but even despite the pressing domestic challenges Obama faced, he played a crucial role in helping facilitate negotiations with the Chinese and Indians behind the scenes at Copenhagen. Although those negotiations delivered a non-binding agreement that fell far short of what many had hoped for, the challenges of getting a comprehensive, binding agreement were always going to exceed the persuasive powers of one individual.

Obama generated leverage with Russia in abandoning Bush-era plans for a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic that had led to a deep rift in relations, and developing a new plan focused on the threat of short-range missiles from Iran. Crucially, the improved relationship with Russia is now beginning to facilitate cooperation on Iran, with the Russians supporting tough new UN sanctions.

However, the term was also picked up by Joseph Nye. A good reputation fosters goodwill and brings acceptance for unpopular ventures. This approach will require a shift in how the U. Obama and Clinton have built upon the Public Diplomacy 2. Updates via text message reached 20, non-US citizens in over countries around the world, with the texts being available in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and eight other languages.

In addition, translated versions of the speech were available to download on YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace, and the South Asian social networking site Orkut. The White House used Facebook to conduct an international discussion on the event, while responses to the speech submitted via text messages were compiled and later posted on America.

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The Obama Administration has breathed new life into public diplomacy initiatives, and accorded it a far higher priority than the Bush Administration. The focus on listening and engagement is pronounced as is the deliberate effort to communicate respect and understanding. The rhetoric is less shrill, less demanding and less confrontational. Metaphorically, the image of U.

To that end, the US under Obama has achieved a better balance than under Bush, but there remain policies, including the use of force in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the failure to close Guantanamo, that continue to undermine the image of America the administration is trying to disseminate. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere.

Pragmatism, it seemed, had again trumped principle. As the administration debated military options, the perception grew that the UK and France were dragging Obama into the conflict, but accounts of the decision-making process reveal an administration, once again, carefully weighing up its options, conscious of how its actions might be perceived in the Arab world, and a determination to work through the UN and Arab League. Hillary Clinton justified the US response in stating that.

Obama appears something of a paradox: It is a form of action - powerfully so - in favour of the status quo. And most everyone in the region understands it as such. Obama appears to have an astute ability to see the world not in narrow black-and-white, good v.

America must use all our influence to encourage reform in the region. Even as we acknowledge that each country is different, we will need to speak honestly about the principles that we believe in, with friend and foe alike. Our message is simple: We must also build on our efforts to broaden our engagement beyond elites, so that we reach the people who will shape the future — particularly young people… We will continue to make good on the commitments that I made in Cairo — to build networks of entrepreneurs, and expand exchanges in education; to foster cooperation in science and technology, and combat disease.

Across the region, we intend to provide assistance to civil society, including those that may not be officially sanctioned, and who speak uncomfortable truths. And we will use the technology to connect with — and listen to — the voices of the people. In fact, real reform will not come at the ballot box alone. Through our efforts we must support those basic rights to speak your mind and access information.

Rhetoric and Reality: Obama’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy – Foreign Policy

We will support open access to the Internet, and the right of journalists to be heard — whether it's a big news organization or a blogger. In the 21st century, information is power; the truth cannot be hidden; and the legitimacy of governments will ultimately depend on active and informed citizens. Yet, the fact that soft power has to sometimes sit alongside hard power, or that others might not respond in the manner in which Obama hoped, does not diminish its significance or utility. The president may not be dogmatically wedded to it, nor apply it consistently, but a genuine appreciation that the United States needs to better incorporate soft power practices and principles into its foreign policy is undoubtedly present in this administration.

To caricature Bush as a hard power president and Obama as a soft power would be false, however. As Obama has acknowledged: Obama is also acutely aware of the limits of American power.

US influence in the world has declined, in part because of growing anti-Americanism and resentment at American policies over the eight years of the Bush Administration, but also because America is no longer the behemoth it once was. Rather, he accepts the limits to American power and seeks to return to an ideal of US exceptionalism in which the US is an exemplar state, leading by example, but which also looks to others to share the burdens of global leadership. He does not reject US exceptionalism — but in many ways he seeks to move beyond interpretations of it that have became deeply entrenched in the US political psyche.

From the bottom of our souls, we hate you. Time will tell as to whether Obama is able to overcome such structural impediments. Oxford University Press, Oxford University Press, , pp. Lynch and Robert Singh, After Bush: Cambridge University Press, Routledge, , xxxvi. Allen Lane, , Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law London: America and Europe in the New World Order , p. Hersh, Chain of Command London: Penguin, , 3. Obama did not share in the cynicism when accepting the prize.

In a characteristic, conscientious speech he accounted for the path he had chosen to follow between the goal of peace and understanding in the world and the rival goal of national security in a world where good and evil are locked in combat. There were those who heard echoes of George W. Obama on the other hand invites further reflection and intellectual struggle with the problem of evil. It would be hard to see Obama as a pliable puppet in the hands of entrenched power groups in Washington. In that role he explains, renders account, and invites the public to reflect.

Obama is keenly aware of this long line of history, using it to place himself squarely in an American political tradition. Taking this inspirational role Obama not only addresses his fellow Americans, inciting them to political participation. He also speaks to the world, rekindling an enthusiasm for American leadership after the damage done to it during eight long years of the Bush presidency. When still a candidate vying for the presidency Obama gave a speech in Berlin, on 24 July, , before a crowd of thousands whose lost hopes for America Obama seemed to restore and personify.

Obama wanted to present himself as the embodiment of an America with which Europeans could once again feel affiliated: Obama is too much like Lincoln in his awareness of the tragic tension between politics and ethics, between idealism and realism. When confronting such hard choices he is rather a man of steel, not the weed that waves with the tides.

He does not hesitate to speak his mind on matters of great concern to him, whether it is bankers and their obscene remunerations, or the failing security apparatus in America. Bush has never been willing to own up to such failures. His response was simply to pile on new bureaucratic layers, compounding the problem.

The discomfiture of an economic system, wars without end, the continuing threat of terrorism, an unprecedented level of partisan division, were the dish that was set before the new president. No way he could hope to start with a clean slate. Probably the greatest paradox that Obama had to face up to was the deeply ingrained anti-statism among Americans. Ever since, the pattern of support for and opposition to a view of government as the collective instrument for pursuing the public interest has hardened into the partisan mould of Democrats versus Republicans.

The New Deal, supported by a coalition of forces known as the Roosevelt coalition, constituting the Democratic Party that for decades assumed the role of the natural party of government, gave rise to the slow and contested early formation of a welfare state on American soil. Incrementally, step by step, its further development took place under Democratic Party auspices well into the s. Obama wishes to continue in that tradition, albeit in a political climate more resistant than ever before. The solid Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress since the elections may have seemed to open a window of opportunity, yet the hardening of political support and opposition, if not obstruction, along strictly partisan lines, in addition to the loud-mouthed populism in the media and among the population at large never boded well.

Yet time has been running out fast. If Obama manages to ride out the storm of populist and right-wing obstruction, he may in the end effect a change in the political climate, if not the political culture of the country, not unlike the late s. Then, the continuing depression had offered Roosevelt the opportunity the bring about a culture that gave central place to a sense of solidarity and collective endeavor. Thus it promoted a range of artistic projects that aimed at the common people as its audience. In literature, in music and the theater, in photography and painting, artists went through a vernacular, or folk, period in their careers.

They chose to descend from their elitist, ivory towers and opened themselves up to the common American as their public, which, in government-sponsored projects, they set out to serve. Orienting himself in the s upon the international musical avant-garde, in the late s he turned to the use of American folk repertoire to find his vernacular voice. A typical composition in this vein is his Fanfare for the Common Man , an ode to the common man seen as the central support of American democracy. Another composition from this period — the Lincoln Portrait of - is an ode to Lincoln, or rather to his inspired use of language.

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Visually Copland is no Lincoln. He is a shy and slightly awkward man, not the type of a public orator.

Yet he manages to rise above himself when in his thin voice he takes the text to its climax. In his modest way he brings an ode to Lincoln, or rather an ode to the high ideals of democracy. It already is his solid claim to fame. At the time of my writing this, he has been in power for over three years with a solid record of legislative achievement. It is to be hoped that he has many more years to translate his inspired and inspirational visions in speech as well as in action.

Rhetoric and Reality: Obama’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy

Perhaps he proves able to revive the broad alliance of enthused voters that like a virtual Internet community carried him to the presidency and to turn it into a lasting support of his political power. To that end he must remain what he had been for so many during the campaign, a man holding high the hopes of a new beginning.

Tied up as he is now in the imbroglio of Washington politics, he must at the same time, much like Roosevelt, rise above it and reach out to his nation-wide constituency. He must keep alive a sense of closeness and inclusion among his supporters, rather than leave them mired in alienation.

If successful, Obama may well lead Americans on the way to overcoming their internal divisions and once again inspire, as under Roosevelt, a sense of common effort and collective destiny. And who knows, a new Copland may arise to give musical expression to such a new political and cultural climate. When he took the oath of office, swearing to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States, it seemed like the first step in rolling back the relentless encroachment upon the restraints of executive power set by the Constitution and by international law as endorsed by the United States.

Obama had all the right credentials for this role. As a senator he had voted against the war in Iraq as an illegal war of aggression.


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Obama appeared like the man who would bring to light the dark and secret world, beyond the reach of law and legal protections, that America had ventured upon, a world of illegal surveillance of its own citizenry, a world of secret renditions of terrorist suspects, and of torture and hi-tech retaliatory assassination. He appeared to bring a promise of ending all this and to return to a presidency under the law, rather than above it. In words from his inaugural address: Ever more intrusive in the fabric of social relations in the name of anti-terrorist surveillance, ever more scornful of institutional countervailing powers, the Bush presidency subverted the American constitution, although held by oath to protect it.

This can be seen as only the latest, most daring, version of what Arthur Schlesinger in his book, The Imperial Presidency , warned Americans against. Thus he rewrote legislation, duly enacted by Congress, with signing statements giving him leeway not to implement laws as enacted.

Thus he could create dark zones beyond the reach of American law, such as most ignominiously at Guantanamo Bay. When President Bush signed a new law, sponsored by Senator McCain, restricting the use of torture when interrogating detainees, he also issued a Presidential signing statement. That statement asserted that his power as Commander-in-Chief gives him the authority to bypass the very law he had just signed.

And before that, Bush declared he had the unilateral authority to ignore the Geneva Conventions and indefinitely to detain without due process both immigrants and citizens as enemy combatants. Hopes were that Obama, taking his oratorical cues from Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, might indeed take America back to its first high principles which as Machiavelli reminds us is the central recipe for preserving a republic.

This would require a more direct, and intellectually articulate, communication with his American and world audience. Obama may find it hard to give up gains in executive power as they have accrued to the presidency over the last several years. Yet in a democratic spirit, upholding the constitution, while scaling back some of the legal enormities of the Bush administration, he may develop ways of forceful leadership that Americans and non-Americans alike will see as convincing and legitimate. In fact, early signs seemed to point rather in the direction of continuity with Bush administration practices.

Thus, in the crucial civil rights area of the treatment of detainees held in the context of the war on terror, the Obama administration took steps and invented arguments to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight. Bush , actually respect the Constitution, acted in contravention of the War Powers Resolution adopted by Congress when he authorized U.

Hence, the War Powers Resolution did not apply. The culmination point so far is the flood of Wikileaks foreign policy documents. In the manner of a unitary executive, without due process, it has held an alleged leaker of documents, Bradley Manning, in solitary confinement, it steps into the field of economic transactions, blocking credit card payments to Wikileaks, in addition to pressuring foreign governments in its search for the main culprit, Julian Assange.

The text goes on to indict the Obama administration for expanding the use of drone attacks and for arguing that the U. Not surprisingly the president has seen his policies of secrecy given the blessing of conservative commentators. Leaks of counterterrorism secrets to the press, and disclosure of counterterrorism techniques and procedures in courtrooms, can imperil the war effort. We are thus faced squarely with the abiding tension between liberty and security. But Schoenfeld goes on to conclude: Obama is doing the right thing. As president he now finds himself in a role as commander-in-chief, fighting two ground wars and a more general one against the elusive enemy of global terrorism, without a clear exit strategy.

They are wars he took over when entering office, and which he pursues by means that make it hard to see a personal touch to distinguish him from his predecessor, let alone to recognize the signs of a transformational presidency. Yet those were the words that Colin Powell, a black Republican, used in his quiet and eloquent television endorsement of Obama during the electoral campaign. Here we had a man who had given his name to a military doctrine, the Powell doctrine, reminding military planners never to enter a war without a clear exit strategy.

A full two years later, President Obama is mired in wars without exit strategies, expanding programs of secret action in the Mideast, without any prospect of the endeavor holding the promise of a new beginning. If his march to the White House testified to the power of rhetoric, Obama has found no way yet, it seems, to use the presidency as a bully pulpit to engage and educate his public in the moral dilemmas of the exercise of power.

In other words, he has not yet developed a rhetoric of power. In contrast to this, a rhetoric of power, as I here envision it, would demand Obama once again to rise above himself, above the din of voices in Washington circles and the media, and to address the ethical dilemmas and quandaries of democratic leadership, to address the tension between secrecy and national security, and to become the democratic educator that Lincoln was before him.

These are all means of confrontation that may well result in swelling the ranks of enemy forces rather than quelling them. Using public speech to convey such a sense of irony, if not of the tragic quality of democratic leadership, is a tall order and does not necessarily go down well with the larger public.