Steven Johnston
is the author of American Dionysia: Violence, Tragedy, and Democratic Politics.
Barack Obama
has delivered many superb speeches in his national political career. A gifted
orator when inspired, Obama can stir and spur others. Obama’s
address to the nation from the Oval Office on December 6, 2015, following
the slaughter in San Bernardino, California, may not have moved many citizens,
but for that very reason I would suggest it was perhaps the most important
speech, even the best speech, he has made as president. As Republican
presidential candidates compete with one another to corner the political market
on mindless machismo in response to terrorism—with Ted Cruz the apparent winner
by insisting that he would order the Defense Department to carpet-bomb the
Islamic State into submission—Obama remains preternaturally cool, calm, and composed.
When under fire, the world’s most powerful nation-state needs self-possession in
those who govern. Ironically, this sensibility seems to frustrate even those
well-disposed to Obama. Frank
Bruni, sounding eerily similar to David
Brooks slandering John Kerry in the 2004 election, “question[s] the
intensity of Barack Obama’s focus on the Islamic State and the terrorist
threat,” insisting that “we didn’t see quite the passion that this moment
demands or quite the strength that a fearful country craves.” Bruni, alas, is
too focused on dissecting the fearful bigotry of Donald Trump to notice, let
alone admit, his own undue fear of the “barbarians” at the gate.
What was
remarkable about Obama’s speech—and about his presidency as a whole—was its
utter lack of ressentiment. This is a president with every reason to be
furious. The Islamic State is a murderous force that could not have come into
being if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had not indulged the neo-conservative
fantasy of regime change in Iraq. The blood on their hands knows no apparent
end or limit. But he has refused to single them out and hold them responsible
for what they have wrought. Obama not only declined to prosecute them for their
various crimes against the Constitution and humanity when he first took office.
Despite their horrific legacy, he effectively assumes unqualified
responsibility for the Islamic State and asks Congress to join him by
authorizing the use of military force against it. If Congress really believes
that the United States is at war with the Islamic State—which individual
members can’t say often enough—then it’s time to prove it with something other
than rants and raves.
Obama addressed
the nation on December 6 and offered the American people a lesson in “tragedy.”
This kind of political education is precisely what many Americans gripped by fear
and panic do not want right now, but it may be exactly what is needed. It can
provide necessary distance which, not to be confused with indifference, is
critical so we don’t blindly make matters worse—not despite but because of
actions we take. The tragedy to which Obama referred is not (just) that
fourteen people “were brutally murdered.” The tragedy is that the United States,
as I mentioned, created the circumstances that made it possible for the Islamic
State to emerge and nothing we do can rewrite the past or lessen our culpability.
The tragedy is that the Islamic State has “turned to less complicated acts of
violence like the mass shootings that are all too common” in the United States,
which means that while we can defend ourselves (and can do more to defend
ourselves), we will never be able to provide a foolproof guarantee that more terrorist
attacks won’t take place. We have engendered that kind of hatred. The tragedy
is that Obama must insist, whether it’s credible or not, that the United States
will overcome terrorism, destroy the Islamic State, and ultimately prevail “by
being strong and smart, resilient and relentless, and by drawing upon every
aspect of American power.” Yet to prevail here means that the Islamic State cannot
and will not be destroyed by American military power. To privilege a resort to
arms is self-defeating and self-destructive: “We should not be drawn once more
into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria. That’s what groups like
[the Islamic State] want. They know they can’t defeat us on the battlefield.
[Islamic State] fighters were part of the insurgency that we faced in Iraq. But
they also know that if we occupy foreign lands, they can maintain insurgencies
for years, killing thousands of our troops, draining our resources, and using
our presence to draw new recruits.”
Unlike Jeb
Bush, Obama knows that the Islamic State cannot “destroy
Western civilization.” The tragedy is that the United States has mortal
enemies that wish it deadly harm and there is nothing that we can do to
eliminate existential enmity and the nihilistic violence it inspires. The world
is not ontologically or politically predisposed in America’s favor. The tragedy
is that the best we can do is contain and control the Islamic State, a necessarily
modest policy that is already showing signs of success
in Iraq, which also means that the Islamic State has already made plans and
preparations for its strategic retreat
to Libya—when the time comes. And should it be driven from Libya in a few
years, under a different president, no doubt it will relocate elsewhere. The
drive to eliminate evil actors altogether from the world cannot be redeemed.
The tragedy is that successful terrorist attacks in the United States do not
mean that the Islamic State is not being effectively countered. The tragedy is
that it means that the United States is again experiencing the kind of violence
that much of the rest of the world experiences routinely—and for which the
United States is often responsible.
Barack Obama spent
part of his national address suggesting “what we should not do.” He understands
better than the Republicans running for his job that the United States must be
careful not to betray its own values in the effort to protect the country from
terrorist attack. Above all else, we must not become the enemy we oppose and
fight, a problem the United States did not negotiate well during the country’s
prior global struggle with the Communist Other in the Cold War. Unfortunately,
it is a fate to which the United States has already succumbed—that is, long
before the United States started thinking publicly about denying refugees that
it helped create entry into the country. George Bush resorted to illegal war,
rendition, secret gulags, and torture, all in the name of defending the
so-called homeland. As I said, no one knows this descent better than Barack
Obama, not only because he made a conscious choice not to prosecute the
criminals that preceded him in the executive branch. Obama knows this
dissolution well because, among other things, his own drone war has killed and
maimed thousands of innocent civilians in a callous disregard for life and limb
in the pursuit of national security and to protect our way of life. The tragedy
is that we may not have become our enemy, but we are not as different from it
as we would like to think either, and we have no one to blame but ourselves.
The difference may or may not be small, but it is still significant and that is
what Barack Obama tried to tell the nation on December 6, especially when he
implored us to “make sure we never forget what makes us exceptional.” The
tragedy is that it doesn’t look like very many were listening—or capable of
hearing.
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