I recently read a fascinating and disturbing article in The New Yorker, by Jon Lee Anderson, on the rise and defeat of Islamists in Mali. I was struck by two particular descriptions of the Islamists’ behavior:

“In the central square, Idrissa had witnessed the beating of one of the jihadis’ own men, who had been accused by his comrades of raping a young girl. The spectators loudly criticized the jihadis for a double standard. “Everyone was angry because they didn’t kill him,” Idrissa said. Afterward, the jihadis had gone on the local radio station and warned that anyone who spoke badly about their men would be killed.”

The other:

“Then, on day two, the Islamists came,” he recalled. He had asked the leader what he wanted. Naming the northern towns of Mali, he had said, “Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal are Muslim towns, and we want to make Sharia in them. We are not asking. We are saying what we are doing, and we’re here to make Sharia.”

What I found so troubling was not only “the usual” Al Qaeda-related atrocities, but even more so the Islamist’s clearly voiced goal of destroying an existing social system through violence, devastation of cultural heritage (vandalizing local temples and libraries). This was tied together with the idea of creating a different social order based on sexual control, and the replacement of any traces of modern knowledge by radical interpretations of old religious texts. The irony is that these readings are just as contemporary as the lifestyle the Islamists try to erase.

In my opinion, these two quotes illustrate the power of violence combined with unquestionable certainty, able to undermine an entire civilization—its customs, morals, social order, and authorities. They fall apart in the presence of arrogant brutality. The people are too “civilized,” too cultured to defend themselves. The Islamists reject a civilization they claim is morally corrupt, and instead attempt to replace it with a modern essentialist take on an imagined Golden Age of religious purity.

The case of Islamists in Mali is an extremely vivid example of a contemporary violent essentialism we can witness in many different places and with changing force. There are the extreme right-wing nationalists and Christian religious fundamentalists in Europe and the US, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn activists in Greece, the Le Pen nationalists in France, the Tea Party in the US, as well as the Polish nationalist youth, with neo-Nazi and pagan ties, who recently tried to interrupt Zygmunt Bauman’s lecture at the University of Wrocław.

All these groups seem to play on a fantasy of a bygone era of a harmonious society formed solely by “us,” without outsiders or deviations from the unanimously accepted norms, “inventing” their traditions, as Eric Hobsbawm would have named it. The past is idealized into the present in a form deeply conservative but also modernly total, one in which men rule and women obey; the “we” are the masters, the “others” are the slaves. There is no space for sexual freedom or mental sickness. Foucault’s descriptions of these freedoms in the Middle Ages seem, on the contrary, extremely modern.

In this sense, the current fundamentalist movements are essentialized ideas of a glorious past, devoid of any ambiguity. They are definite, brutal and all-encompassing in a way only an extreme mixture of Enlightenment and Totalitarianism could lead to. They are belief systems based on a logic of the elimination of “otherness.”

The past to which they refer, never was. The refusal to acknowledge the ambiguous, heterogeneous, histories of cultures, religions, ethnicities, and civilizations, makes these movements arrogantly, violently contemporary.

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.

On September 29^th, Omar Khadr found himself on a flight from Guantanamo Bay to Canada. Khadr is a Canadian citizen, and his return was an uncomfortable homecoming. A commenter on a news story expressed a widely shared sentiment: “It does not seem right that Canada took him back into her arms after trying to cut one off.”

Omar Khadr’s story prompts us to revisit ideas about status, law, and belonging in the U.S. and in Canada. Khadr was the youngest of the Guantanamo Bay detainees. He was detained when he was 15, and was released to a Canadian prison at age 26. He is the last citizen of a NATO state to be released. How did this happen? Without the despicable legal constructions of the U.S. “war on terror,” a 15 year old who survived a firefight with U.S. troops would not have been detained for nine years or have pled guilty to homicide. Yet, his return would have been speedier were it not for the Canadian reluctance to recognize Khadr as a citizen. It took a 2010 Canadian Supreme Court decision and two years of pushing his file from desk to desk to facilitate his return.

Khadr found himself in a terrible predicament. The U.S. insisted that he was a war criminal, and the Canadian government, relying on this vilification, pretended it had no obligation towards him. After all, he was only an “accidental citizen” (Peter Nyers), not a “real” one.

Omar Khadr was born in Toronto, but his father was the “un-Canadian” al Qaeda associate Ahmed Said Khadr. Since the 1990s, the family spent much time in Afghanistan and Pakistan. On 27 July 2002, Omar Khadr was part of a group that was attacked by U.S. forces. He was seriously injured; all other members of his group were killed. Three coalition soldiers were killed, among them one U.S. service member: Christopher Speer. Khadr was charged with killing Speer. Khadr was captured and eventually transferred to the infamous detention camp in Guantanamo Bay.

In Canada, those who argue in favor of embracing Khadr as a citizen and neighbor cite the fact that he was only 15 when he was captured. He was a child soldier, and courts typically refrain from charging persons under 18 years of age for violence committed in war. This is true, and yet it is not even half the story. More importantly, Khadr’s status and “identity” as a terrorist and war criminal were produced by novel legal arguments backed with physical and psychological force. His fate shows in an exemplary way how law and power produce truths.

Like the other Guantanamo Bay detainees, Omar Khadr was classified as an “alien unlawful enemy combatant,” a very strange classification, developed by the U.S. military to produce a status of rightlessness.

Traditionally, the law of war distinguishes between two groups of people: civilians and combatants. Each group is subject to a specific and distinct set of rules. Civilians may not participate in war, and they cannot be targeted by combatants. Combatants are allowed to participate in the violence of war (within bounds, such as not targeting civilians), but they can also be legitimately targeted in war. In short: only those who may kill may be killed.

What, then, is an “alien unprivileged enemy combatant?” The phrase “enemy combatant” was coined by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1941 decision on German soldiers who intended to commit sabotage in the U.S. wearing civilian clothing. This legal innovation allowed the government to treat some people as having none of the rights of civilians and none of the rights of combatants. It was recycled and extended in a series of court decisions. I have traced the history in detail elsewhere.

After 9/11, the Bush government wanted to detain, transfer, question, charge, and convict enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. This desire plainly contradicted the established laws of war. Prisoners of war cannot be blamed for having participated in war.

In 2006, the government passed legislation establishing military commissions to try “alien unlawful enemy combatants.” “Alien” was a new modifier because U.S. citizens were entitled to rights that people like Omar Khadr weren’t. The rightless people were subject to detention, as well as trials by military commissions, until the “war on terror” ends. The military commissions did not include independent lawyers or judges, and they operated by rules of evidence that seemed to have been copied from Stalin’s playbook.

Omar Khadr was, in other words, rendered rightless by the country that captured him. He was also tortured. The conditions at Guantanamo Bay were so inhuman that nine detainees have committed suicide, and an untold number have attempted to do so.

What did the Canadian government do upon finding out about the legal black hole and physical torture to which a Canadian citizen, a minor, was subjected? It sent a delegation to visit and interrogate him.

In 2007, Omar Khadr was charged by a military commission with murdering U.S. soldier Christopher Speer by throwing a hand grenade, and with manufacturing IEDs, i.e. home-made explosive devices. The grenade was manufactured in the U.S., so experts have questioned whether it originated from the group around Omar Khadr.

In October 2008, as part of a plea agreement, Khadr admitted to killing Christopher Speer after the firefight had ended. Khadr, having received no assistance from the Canadian government, agreed to an eight years prison term, part of it to be served in Canada. Thus, Khadr’s “admission” of guilt is not a document of facts found by an independent court, but a statement obtained through torture, intimidation, and the sheer inequality of the parties at the military commission.

The commission proceeded on the basis of the law that had already designated Khadr unprivileged enemy combatant whose violence was by definition illegal. When the U.S. military rendered Omar Khadr an unprivileged belligerent who can be killed but may not kill, it simultaneously rendered Christopher Speer a hyper-privileged combatant who may kill, but whose death is prosecuted as murder. Because of this hierarchy between unprivileged and hyper-privileged combatants, Khadr returns to Canada as a murderer, a terrorist, a war criminal.

What awaits him? Public Safety Minister Vic Toews called him a “known supporter of the al-Qaeda terrorist network and a convicted terrorist.” Others are embarrassed for the Canadian inaction in his case. Khadr is imprisoned in high-security facility in Millhaven, Ontario. He will be eligible for day parole in January 2013, and for full parole later in 2013.

How will Khadr’s eligibility for parole be determined? The Parole Board considers an applicant’s “criminal and social history, the reasons for and type of offense,” their “understanding of the offense and any past offenses,” “progress,” for example “through participation in programs” and “behavior” in the institution.”

Khadr faces the board as a convicted murderer, not as a former child soldier who survived detention and torture at Guantanamo Bay. The Canadian legal system’s recognition of facts created by the U.S. military commission doubles the injury that the U.S. inflicted on him.

Omar Khadr was not only let down by his family that dragged him into war, but also by two countries that vilified and rejected him. A strange homecoming indeed.

Sitting quietly at my desk yesterday, thinking my thoughts about earthquakes, hurricanes, and the glorious Libya campaign, I was awakened by a phone call. A radio reporter from one of our major Chicago stations called, asking for my opinion about a newly minted coloring book that is designed to help children remember the “truth” of 9/11. This effort from a company named “Really Big Coloring Books” is what they describe as a “graphic coloring novel.” Perhaps we should think of this as a “Mickey Maus” effort.

While the coloring book, rated PG by corporate description, aims at teaching children “the facts surrounding 9/11,” it is not without its red-state politics. The company claims proudly that “Our Coloring Books are made in the USA. Since 1988.” The production of coloring books has not, yet, been outsourced to Vietnam. The book, We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom, has as its target audience a group that can, in fact, never remember 9/11, but only know of the day through the visceral accounts that we provide. According to the publisher, “The book was created with honesty, integrity, reverence, respect and does not shy away from the truth.” When a publisher (no author is listed) suggests that a work does not “shy away” from the truth, he is suggesting that others are doing that very shying and that the truth is both unambiguous and uncomfortable.

The book is filled with accounts of brave Americans and dangerous Arabs, and the text reminds its readers, “Children, the truth is these terrorist acts were done by freedom-hating radical Islamic Muslim extremists. These crazy people hate the American way of life because we are FREE and our society is FREE.” Nice touch, particularly on the page in which “the coward” Bin Laden is shot, while using women and children as a shield. One wonders which age child is captivated both by Crayolas and by the moral philosophy of human shields.

But my argument is less about this canonical text than about the process by which hot memories become cool.

By the tenth anniversary, particularly after the shooting of Osama bin Laden and the organizational decay of the Al Qaeda infrastructure, September 11^th is barely with us. Yes, we have to remove belts, shoes, and wallets at the airport, and yes we make Canadians show border control agents their passports (and we, in return, are compelled to show them ours when we visit Canada). However, on most days we think no more about the World Trade Center than we think about Pearl Harbor. September 11^th remembrance has become ritualized – a calendrical custom – rather than firmly situated within our national identity.

And this is how it should be. Trauma has an expiration date: a time after which it is no longer relevant as an insistent reality. As a people, we have moved on. While there are terrorists about, they excite no more concern than a low-grade fever. The likelihood of an event on the magnitude and complexity of 9/11 occurring again is remote. Radical Islam is in retreat, if it ever were on the march. Yes, a few failed states exist in which radicals have found a home, but there are no states where the central authority actively pursues a radical Islamic agenda.

And so I call for the tenth anniversary of the September 11^th attacks to be our final collective gasp of über-patriotism, serving as a bookend for active memory rather than as a spark to inspire the furious. To be sure we will remember the attacks in the same modest way that we recall Fort Sumter, Pearl Harbor, or Hiroshima, but mostly as a historical curiosity.

Days that are said to live in infamy have a way, over time, to live as relics. This is to the good. Times change. Crises pass, and villains find their evil trimmed. The death of 3000 is no trivial matter, of course, and it deserved the shock and anger that we felt in 2001. But in the past decade, many have been targeted and many more have succumbed to disasters natural and manmade.

In this second post of three, DC contributors continue our discussion about the killing of Osama bin Laden and its implications,  seeking to formulate critical perspectives, moving toward judgment and political positioning. -Jeff

Michael P. Corey, A Direct Accounting

In simple terms, it appears that a JSOC strike team was dispatched on what was for all practical considerations a kill assignment to eliminate the head of Al Qaeda and retrieve all available documents. The mission was a risky way to accomplish the first objective; the only practical way to achieve the second; and had the potential to cause the least amount of collateral damage. It is unclear if this was done as a military operation or civilian operation. It is also unclear what was used as the moral, ethical and legal foundations for killing.  It demonstrated the resolve of the Obama and Bush administrations to seek out and kill Osama bin Laden, and presumably other terrorist leaders.  For the most part, the decision making and operation have been represented in the United States as difficult, courageous, and heroic, and as might have been expected, there have been political overtones on all sides.

Euphoric reactions to the mission are consistent with releasing pent up tensions related to terrorism; a national social, economic and cultural malaise, and a loss of national pride. Not releasing the photographic evidence is a good idea. If released, the photographs could have been used as the visual basis for building collective memories and actions by bin Laden’s followers. I’m uncomfortable with a Presidential visit to “ground zero” at this time. The tenth anniversary would have been better as a symbolic mechanism for pulling people together.

Gary Alan Fine, The Human Comedy

Turning on the television last Sunday I was startled to witness boisterous, ecstatic crowds. Americans gathered in the dark outside the White House and in New York’s Times Square to cheer for their team. “U.S.A., U.S.A. “Hoo-yah.” Were it not for the messages at the bottom of the screen, one might have been forgiven for assuming that America’s team pulled off another Olympic hockey triumph.

We’ve won. Not in the battle of sport, but in the sport of battle. Navy seals with CIA support had terminated that most evil of Hitler’s spawn, Osama bin Laden. Rot in Hell, Osama!

I wanted to be joyous, but I could not rid a sour taste. Yes, the killing of Osama bin-Laden was legitimate. His commitment to attacking secular, Western institutions was profound (his firm pro-life stance didn’t make him any more cuddly). You live by violence, you die as you live. And perhaps without a jazzy figurehead, radical jihad will be a less happenin’ ideology. Perhaps soon I won’t have to untie my shoes or have government agents inspect my privates when I travel.

Still, bin Laden’s death justifies a piece of his global critique. Bin Ladenism recognized the arrogance of a unipolar world, seeing hubris in America’s global overreach. We deserve a modest, respectful foreign policy, but often we are an international pufferfish, deadly when aroused. With our power, we set the terms for international conflict that – surprise! – benefit our strategic capabilities (smart bombs, good; anonymous attacks, nasty). We set the rules of intervention so that justice is ours. Hello Muammar!

The stance we select fits our discursive morality. And this choice might be the least bad of those flawed, authoritarian systems that we have bolstered. But should the cheering crowds be correct that Osama will rot in Hell, he surely will learn much in the University of Hell’s distinguished graduate program in International Relations.

Bin Xu, Presidential Performance

Obama performed well during his visit to Ground Zero. He performed well by fitting himself into instead of manipulating the scene. Political figures’ performances enjoy much less freedom than we usually assume. Try to imagine we mentally airbrush Obama out from pictures of the commemoration and focus more on the scene. We would find Ground Zero now is not filled with relics, dusts, and corpses, but giant cranes and the unfinished memorial hall. Relief instead of anger, and even a little festive mood are expressed in firefighters’ peaceful smiles. We perhaps could also hear murmurs of suspicions and laughter of jokes in the background. Will the President imitate his predecessor by exploiting death, tears, and triumph to divert attention from various problems, such as the birth certificate issue and the grave economy, or to strengthen his bid for reelection? In a nutshell, this is not a stage for a “tough guy” delivering a bullhorn speech and calling for revenge. It demands a low-profile and ambiguous performance to close the wound.

Now we put Obama back in to the pictures. He did not deliver a formal speech. Nor did he do any grandiose symbolic practices. He placed a wreath and observed a moment of silence. He quietly shook hands with relatives of the victims. When he did speak, informally, with the firefighters, he smartly called attention to “justice” that “transcends politics” and the sacrifice of “your brothers” in Pakistan. Therefore, as in the Vietnam War Memorial, this lack of conspicuity kept the whole commemoration open to various interpretations, which surprisingly reached a minimum consensus on value of individual life and dignity. What he smartly did was simple: tuning his display of emotions to match the emotive demand of the scene. As Goffman observes, “Not, then, men and their moments. Rather moments and their men.”

Benoit Challand, Judgment

Juan Cole is right in saying that showing pictures of Bin Laden would give him undue charisma down the line. But it is sad to see the spin doctors active in the last days justifying very shallowly that “justice has been done” (so what comes next?  Let us get rid of the remaining Guatanamo prisoners to satisfy the needs of the populus juventusque?), that torture (let us call a spade a spade) has produced marvelous intelligence results, or that the killing was simply self-defense in a moment of “split second” decision? On the other hand, it is remarkable to read the reactions of survivors’ families and their ambiguous feelings about the killing of Bin Laden. This suggests that paying tribute to the memory of the victims of 9/11 can be done in more complex and subtle manners.

My post on the announcement of the killing of Osama bin Laden and the reaction to it stimulated a fascinating debate. As a way of continuing it, I asked the contributors to Deliberately Considered to add their observations and judgments. I invited each to write a short note responding to the following:

What is the meaning of the killing of bin Laden and the American public’s reaction to it? Is the Obama administration correct in not releasing photos of the bin Laden’s body? And what do you think about Obama’s visit to “ground zero today?  I asked them to respond to all three of the questions, any one or any combination.

A number of the responses seem to be shaped by the specific location of the contributors. I first post these. I will post the rest over the weekend, and will add my reflections on the contributions and on reader responses on Monday. Again, I invite Deliberately Considered readers to add their judgments. It would be particularly interesting to know how people see this global media event from a variety of other specific locations, here in the U.S. and around the world. -Jeff

Ahmad Sadri, Illinois

As the news of the killing of Usamah Bin Laden broke I was on a live radio show (WGN’s Extension 70, Chicago.)   I was asked about my impression. The most prominent feeling that I had was relief.   I wasn’t relieved because UBL had been killed by American SEALs.  The man had little influence on the operations of Al Qaeda. He had been made irrelevant by the Arab Spring that is the farthest possible thing from the demented dreams of his militant Islamism.

I was relieved because the execution of UBL was a denouement for a vendetta.  Americans have been consumed with rage because the perpetrator of the horrific acts of terrorism on that bloody Tuesday ten years ago was never caught.  It is my belief that this public fury was partly responsible for the biggest blunder of American foreign policy: the invasion of Iraq.  The haughty neo-cons that planned and executed that war were high on an ideological ego trip, and they relied on the reservoir of festering collective anger as they sold their “noble lies” about Saddam’s WMDs.

Probably many of the readers of this blog, their political leanings notwithstanding, have cringed at the sight of the celebrations that followed the demise of UBL.  But, these triumphalist exhibitions signaled a cathartic moment in American life. It was befitting that President Obama remained silent at the laying of the wreath on Ground Zero.  But the anger of the masses had to be satisfied in a mob scene… and, I hope, it was.

Laura Pacifici, Rhode Island

I am embarrassed, to say the least, by the way in which my generation responded to the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. The Washington Post reported that just as Obama declared that “justice had been done,” students across the country gathered together to celebrate the news by cracking open beers and chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” on and around their college campuses. Prompted by statuses on Facebook such as “Party on the White House lawn,” students from universities in Washington, D.C. (American University, Georgetown, Howard University…) took the news as an opportunity to celebrate in the streets. But universities in D.C. were not the only ones to experience these sorts of celebrations. On my campus, Brown University, a friend informed me that individuals in a dorm next to his were playing “Born in the U.S.A.” and gathering for drinks.

Jubilance of this kind is not only inappropriate but also offensive. We were horrified to see Bin Laden supporters celebrating the death of Americans on September 11, 2001, and here we are doing the same about Bin Laden. The death of Bin Laden certainly was symbolic of our (momentary) triumph over Al Qaeda; it may have even offered the closure that the nation and those personally affected by 9/11 needed; and for some it offered legitimacy for our ongoing military presence in the Middle East. But as an Associated Press article points out, “It’s one thing to be satisfied that the world’s most wanted terrorist has been killed by a U.S. Navy SEAL unit in Pakistan. But where does satisfaction end and gloating begin?”

While I may not approve of the reaction that some college students had to this news, it is true that my generation has a unique relationship to 9/11 and the subsequent missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. While our parents’ young adult years were defined by the Vietnam War, we have come of age just as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan developed. It is odd to claim these events as our own given our lack of involvement in the wars (especially compared to our parents’ involvement in Vietnam) and our general apathy to its ongoing progress. But perhaps what we saw on Sunday night in the reactions to Bin Laden’s death was some subconscious recognition of a vested interest that we, in my generation, have in seeing that America successfully kills the enemy who has defined the history of our lives so far.

Chris Eberhardt, China

At about 11:15am Beijing time (10:15pm NY time) I received the following text: “bid laden dead. americans are said to have body”. I checked the NY Times, there was no mention, but the BBC had something. I forwarded the text to a friend from New York. That evening it was the cover story in the Beijing papers, and those I overheard gasped at the news.

I asked my students the next day if they thought bin Laden was dead, eight students said no, and the ninth said he didn’t care. My students asked me if I thought he was dead, and I replied that I believed the news more than they did. I asked them if they would believe the news if it was announced the Chinese army had killed bin Laden, the answer was the same.

Like others, I watched the pictures of revelers with a bit of amazement, but what stuck with me more were the images of enhanced security in New York and Washington, D.C. I saw more guns (not pistols either) than I’ve seen in over a year being here in Beijing, and Beijing is not short on police or military officers.

I think it’s telling that security went up, and not down afterward. In Beijing almost every day I put my backpack into the subway x-ray machines to prevent domestic terrorism. But there is a certain level of inner peace living here in China, that I’m not sure is possible again in the United States without dramatic changes in foreign policy, not simply killing someone who objected to US foreign policy.

Andras Bozoki, Hungary

(Directly answering the questions posed.)

1. The meaning of killing of Osama bin Laden is that the U.S. is ready to ‘pay back the loans’ by any means necessary. It sends a message to future terrorists that their crime will not be forgotten and forgiven. It also means that the U.S. defines the war on terror literally as a war where enemies are killed. (So this is not framed as peace-time activity with its procedure of legal justice.) It’s war, not peace. Democratic, human, and national pride is as important (if not more) than the procedures of the criminal code.

2. The U.S. administration should come up with clear evidence that Osama is indeed dead, otherwise many people will simply not believe it. A picture circulated about the dead the Ceausescus in Romania in 1989 as well which served as proof of the execution. However, if the picture is too brutal, it might have a boomerang effect, and it might provoke strong anti-US sentiments. I understand the US government not publishing the pictures (although some newspapers will certainly), but then it should present some other forms of evidence.

3. I had no time to follow the details of Obama’s visit to Ground Zero from Hungary. I find understandable that he wants to pick the political fruits, on the terrain of symbolic politics, of this successful military operation. By this move, he can win the hearts of millions of US citizens. He can recapture his popularity, and by doing so he can make a significant step towards his re-election next year. This is a pragmatic political move that is usually done by politicians in similar situations.

Anna Paretskaya, Wisconsin

Here in Madison, there actually hasn’t been much public reaction to Bin Laden’s death, definitely no celebrations like around the White House — either because 9/11 and anything that relates to it (except the two wars in which many local kids serve and die) is far removed for most people here, or because local developments (which are still happening) take up most people’s time and energy. I think that same as Wisconsin events are muted and remote for most people on the east coast, so does Bin Laden’s death seem somewhat of an “east coast affair.” Do we even live in the same country?

Nahed Habiballah, Palestine

Killing Bin Laden is seen by many as an act of revenge. Because it was inflicted by a superpower does not change the fact that such action was based on primal instincts: “an eye for an eye.” What is alarming about this action is that it legitimizes killing instead of legal prosecution. Such prosecution would be more sensible, yielding the possibility of true justice and information through interrogation, as opposed to killing.

Moreover, the way the Americans conducted the operation has given a green light to use excessive force, suggesting that all measures should be taken to quash the enemy and all means are legitimate. The following piece from Ha’aretz reflects this sentiment.

“The paradox is fascinating. Barack Obama is winning a war George W. Bush went out to fight. Obama’s democratic America is winning thanks to the dirty war it is conducting in Pakistan, without the High Court of Justice and B’Tselem.

What is forbidden to Israel in the war against terror is permitted to the United States. That is how victory was achieved. That is how the twin towers’ blood score was settled. That is how a liberal from Chicago has greatly improved his chances of winning a second term in the White House.”

What was unsettling to many Muslims was how Bin Laden’s body was dumped into the sea and the allegation that it complies with Islamic burial, while in fact it does not (according to Islamic tradition, only those who die at sea and are a day’s travel away from the land).

Lastly, Obama’s visit to ground zero had clearly the re-election campaign in mind, even though he wanted to portray it as a victory for the U.S. How is it a victory when Bin Laden was able to escape the greatest army in the world for nine years? Obama gave Bin Laden more value when he presented him as a U.S. rival.

Irit Dekel, Germany

The cover story this week of the German center-left weekly, Die Zeit, is on Bin Laden’s death. Editor Josef Joffe, in a piece entitled, “Death in the spring,” claims that clearly killing Bin Laden does not imply the sinking of his “murderly business,” and that the Al Qaeda franchise cannot be decapitated by this act. Nor were the offshoots of the second generation of the Red Army Faction. However, Joffe argues that the success of the American SEAL commando was more than a staged victory, because it highlights two encouraging implications: the winners of this “global war on terror” are not elite armies but civilians who helped catch Bin Laden. Second, like Jeff in the opening post about reactions to Bin Laden’s death in the US, Joffe claims that killing Bin Laden after ten long years is not an accident but a culmination of the Arab Spring, a fundamental change of the times. The message from Tahrir Square is that a democracy leaves no room for Bin Laden, and diminishes the attractiveness of terror.

Wolfgang Günter Lerch at the centrist Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, in his article “The World of Yesterday,” claims that Bin Laden symbolizes above all is the “world of yesterday,” having nothing to do with the Arab Rebellion and the struggle for freedom, even if he is seen as a martyr by his followers.

It is probably not by accident that both of these articles’ titles alluded to the shaky, post-war and pre-war times in Spain (Death in the Spring by Rodoreda) and Austria (The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig). The readership of those papers recognize the context, relate to the metaphor, and can then reflect on the content on yet another level of engagement. In the US, staged celebrations of course do not mean that they are unreal, or not reflected on, rather, as Laura Pacifici argues, that they are made for a certain public, at a certain time and place. I hope that this message of an epochal change will be more reflected on, and is celebrated too, and that after the festivities their energy will be channeled to the real work of making this change possible and realistic, by the same generation that made the Arab Spring possible.

In a post submitted before Osama Bin Laden was eliminated, Gary Alan Fine poses a question that is especially pressing after this latest development in the ongoing global wars. –Jeff

Coming out of a bar late one night, a patron finds his friend on his hands and knees searching desperately beneath a streetlamp. “I lost my keys under my car and I must find them,” moans his friend. “But why, if the keys are under a car, are you searching under this lamp?” “Well, the light is much better here.”

This is an old chestnut, none too clever, but one that has powerful political resonance, helping to explain flawed policy decisions. Why, if we worry about the menace of Al Qaeda, have we gone to war against two states – Iraq and Libya – that have distant, even hostile, relations with our terrorist foes. The light is better there.

A student of mine, Michaela DeSoucey, currently at Princeton, wrote her doctoral dissertation about the battles to ban foie gras. She asked the question why is it that animal rights activists chose to make the banning of foie gras a central issue, despite the small amount of foie gras consumed by Americans, as opposed to veal, much more common on American tables – or chicken. Neither baby cows nor poultry sleep under 300-thread count sheets. Her argument is that battling foie gras producers is a far easier task than the cattle or poultry industry. Yet, each battle provides a rich vein of publicity. Foie gras is what DeSoucey labels an easy target: it is, if one can pardon the culinary-mixed metaphor “low-hanging fruit.” Activists hope, but do not expect, that such targets can provide a wedge for other bigger enemies. Not yet.

But my concern is not with the pantry, but with the atlas. Here we are battling in Libya, while Syria falls into chaos. Americans and our NATO allies have determined that it is crucial that we overthrow the Qaddafi regime, even though that regime is opposed to Al Qaeda as are we. And, frankly, it is becoming a vexing pattern. We are only slowly retracing our steps from the mess that we made in Iraq, another Arab state, largely secular, that had little truck with our enemies.

It is surely true that few Americans have any love for either Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi; even The Donald could trump them in a free and fair election in our blue precincts. But this does not explain our involvement. Why do we give those Islamic leaders who are sympathetic to our enemies a pass, while we go all in to destroy secular Arab dictators? Why are we passive – even at times generous – toward governments in Syria and Pakistan?

The answer is that we feel the need to do something, and some somethings are easier than others. The brutality that we are seeing daily from Damascus and throughout the Syrian countryside reveals this clearly. It is true that Qaddafi bluffed that he would kill his opponents, but Assad has shown that actions talk louder than words. Following Teddy Roosevelt, the Syrian regime, supported by the Iranians, speaks softly and carries rapid-fire machine guns.

The danger is that by going after easy targets we undercut our policy goals, no matter how many “mission accomplished” banners we produce or how few allied military are killed. Can anyone claim that the invasion of Iraq benefited American interests in the Middle East? Can anyone claim that the NATO attacks on Libya, while ignoring Syria, will make the Middle East more stable? The outcome in Egypt and the plausible outcome in Libya seems most of all to provide a foothold for a kind of radical Islam that we despise. Perhaps the Muslim Brotherhood will not come to power in either Egypt or in Libya, but it is easy to understand the anxiety in Jerusalem.

Perhaps we are wise to be very cautious in selecting hard targets, but that doesn’t mean that we should be any less diligent in our choice of easy targets. Sometimes those easy targets have unintended consequences that make them very difficult after all.

It is not that American diplomats are blind when it comes to our self-interest; it is simply that they search for the key to global politics where the mission appears effortless, and not where that key might actually be found.

“The Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the End of Combat Operations in Iraq,” of August 31, 2010, was a speech by the head of state, addressed to a nation, about a momentous event.  The President had a responsibility to deliver the speech, and the Oval office was the place to deliver it.  The President had things to say that went beyond partisanship, as I tried to show yesterday.  He was applying his political philosophy to the task at hand, something he first did in his anti-war speech in 2002.  He fully presented his general position in his Nobel Laureate Acceptance Speech, most directly basing it on “just war theory.”  (see Michael Walzer’s book, Just and Unjust Wars) Sometime in the near future, I hope to post more on that, but today, after the last two posts on Obama on Iraq, we move from the consideration of the relationship between context and text, to the text of the speech itself.

The Speech beyond Cynicism

He opens by revealing the logic of the entire speech: “Tonight, I’d like to talk to you about the end of our combat mission in Iraq, the ongoing security challenges we face, and the need to rebuild our nation here at home,” and he then develops and applies the logic. We should note how clearly the speech develops the themes that were the basis of his anti war speech and how it is addressed to a broader audience, not only those who were against the war, but also those who favored it.

About Iraq, Obama is careful.  He focuses on the service and sacrifice of the American military, the defeat “of a regime that terrorized its people” and “the chance for a better future for Iraq,” and underscores that he is delivering on the promise, which he made as a candidate and which was officially agreed upon with the Iraqis, of American withdrawal from the war.  His language is subdued.  He notes accomplishments and dangers.  He addresses his audience as people of good will who are divided in their judgments about the war.

It is at this point he honors President Bush’s patriotism, as he notes that he and the former President disagreed about the war.  The clear message: we Americans were divided about initiating the War, but we are united in honoring the troops that fought the war and hoping that the outcome of the war will serve the interests of the Iraqi people, the region and the interests of the United States, and despite our past differences, we must move on to the challenges before us.

The transition sentence was important, even if it had the sound of cliché, “The greatness of our democracy is grounded in our ability to move beyond our differences, and to learn from our experience as we confront the many challenges ahead.   And no challenge is more essential to our security than our fight against Al Qaeda.”  The President is trying to focus the public on the immediate national security issue.  This is significant and newsworthy, although it was not generally picked up in the media, obsessed as they were about his body language, whether or not he would thank President Bush, apologize for his opposition to the surge, and whether the speech helped or hurt the Democratic Party’s prospects in the upcoming elections, etc.

Obama is defining and delimiting the war in Afghanistan as a war against Al Qaeda.  The tasks are to break the Taliban’s momentum and to prevent Afghanistan from serving again as a base for terrorism.  He justifies increased troop deployments there in these terms and the withdrawal of troops on the same terms.  Progress in Afghanistan and Iraq serve the broader task of peace in the broad region, he maintains, and thus mentions the upcoming negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis.

Yet, his main argument concerns the condition of the nation at home: “Throughout our history, America has been willing to bear the burden of promoting liberty and human dignity overseas, understanding its links to our own liberty and security.  But we have also understood that our nation’s strength and influence abroad must be firmly anchored in our prosperity at home.  … Unfortunately, over the last decade, we’ve not done what’s necessary to shore up the foundations of our own prosperity.”

This is not just a chance transition.  In his first anti-war speech, he warned that the war in Iraq would lead to “undetermined consequences” at home.  The consequences are upon us, and Obama called on his fellow citizens to address them in his speech last week.   There is a need to address problems long neglected. “Our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work.  To strengthen our middle class, we must give all our children the education they deserve, and all our workers the skills that they need to compete in a global economy.  We must jumpstart industries that create jobs, and end our dependence on foreign oil.  We must unleash the innovation that allows new products to roll off our assembly lines, and nurture the ideas that spring from our entrepreneurs.  This will be difficult.  But in the days to come, it must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as President.”

Deliberate Conclusions

Certainly, there are differences concerning the pressing political and economic challenges of our day.  Certainly, Obama was positioning himself and his Party for making their case to the public in the coming elections.  But in the speech on the end of the combat mission in Iraq, the President was calling on the nation to again focus on challenges together, even as he understood that there will be different and competing ways to address the challenges.  He gave a speech as the Head of State to the Nation, unfortunately most commentators across the political spectrum missed this central point.