A SPEECH WITHOUT CONVICTION: CLAUDIA ROSETT
http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/02/obama-speech-west-point-afghanistan-opinions-columnists-claudia-rosett.html
No Conviction In Obama’s Speech
Claudia Rosett,
Credit President Barack Obama that when he delivered his Afghanistan speech this week to cadets at West Point, he was trying to engage with a world he’s never known. He’s never served in the military. He made a lightning trip to Afghanistan during his election campaign, but has never been there as president. He’s spent only a few years in national politics, and not until this January did he arrive at a desk where the buck stops for big decisions in war.
But any savvy politician knows that when it’s time to summon the troops to battle or rouse the country to win its wars, then it is time for a stirring speech. Shakespeare’s Henry V set the iconic bar, steeling himself and his men for the Battle of Agincourt with his cry of “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”
Yet for all Obama’s oratory talent, his West Point speech fell flat. TV cameras panning the audience caught some cadets struggling to keep their eyes open. This was not solely the result of a confused strategy for Afghanistan, or of an awkward delivery by a president slightly out of sync with his teleprompter. There was something else seeping through, in both substance and style, and it was troubling.
This was a speech grounded in an oddly dim vision of America. There were moments in which Obama praised the troops and said some of the appropriate words: “freedom … justice … highest of hopes … ” But overall, it is on qualified, constricted and muted terms that some of these cadets and their brothers (and sisters) in arms will be dispatched to risk their lives for their country. Obama made no mention of fighting for outright victory. More troops will be sent for the rather less inspiring reason that “The status quo is not sustainable.” The mission he outlined is not to win, but simply to bring the war to an “end” (via a commitment that “cannot be open-ended”).
There was plenty in his speech about America’s burden, sacrifice, trials, storms, wrangles, rifts, past sins and deepest fears; including a riff about the “rancor and cynicism and partisanship that has in recent times poisoned our national discourse. ”
There was no full-throated celebration of America’s heart and soul of freedom. The president invoked “the challenges of a new age” in terms by and large so dreary they made the “malaise” of Jimmy Carter’s America sound like high old times. Forget about Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill,” or even Bush 41’s “thousand points of light.” Instead, there was the hallmark Obama apology for America: “We have at times made mistakes.” There was the damped-down phrasing with which Obama described America as having “underwritten global security for more than six decades”–a compliment of sorts, but quite a demotion from leader of the free world to underwriter of global security.
And in that U.S.-underwritten world–with, of course, “all its problems”–we encounter once again those passively enacted events in which there are no specific heroes. Never mind the kind of drum roll tribute that President Bush gave in his 2002 speech at West Point: “You walk in the tradition of Eisenhower and MacArthur, Patton and Bradley–the commanders who saved a civilization.” In the current version, America has been underwriting a sort of glacial drift: Walls “come down,” billions are “lifted from poverty” and together with “unparalleled scientific progress” there are “advancing frontiers of liberty.”
As for filling the shoes of giants, Obama hinted at an America a bit too cynical and past its prime for such stuff: “As a country, we’re not as young–and perhaps not as innocent–as we were when Roosevelt was president.” In this scheme of the universe, mortal combat figures as just one more tool of a multi-tasking White House, part of “the strategy that my administration will pursue to bring this war to a successful conclusion.”
In speaking of Iraq, Obama gave America (and former president George Bush) no credit for leading the overthrow of a mass-murdering, war-mongering tyrant. Nor did he take into account in any way the genuine dangers averted by the removal of Saddam Hussein’s corrupt, violent and predatory regime from the heart of the Middle East. Obama’s focus was on “the wrenching debate” the “substantial rifts,” and the “extraordinary costs” of the Iraq war. He did praise the troops for their “courage, grit and perseverance.” But in this speech, it all added up to nothing more than bringing the Iraq war “to a responsible end,” and “successfully leaving Iraq to its people”–as if America in 2003 had wantonly disturbed a perfectly reasonable setup in Baghdad, and deserved credit merely for rectifying the error.
In the course of apologizing (again) for America, faulting his predecessor, reprising a mess of political infighting and lecturing his audience on the need to live up to “the values we hold dear” (while implying that may be too tall an order for a jaded country), Obama delivered the much-rehearsed news that he will send 30,000 more troops to “end” the war in Afghanistan, and will then start pulling them out within 18 months. In this speech, he also said: “The nation I’m most interested in building is our own.” Great. But when does he realize that leading this free and extraordinary country begins with looking up to his fellow Americans, not tearing them down?
Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.
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