By Patricia H. Kushlis
About time, too.
At a meeting last Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC, John Brennan, Obama’s top White House advisor for Homeland Security and Counter Terrorism formally declared America’s Global War on Terror over. The 23 page transcript is here and it’s well worth reading.
Brennan’s declaration was favorably reported by Doug Saunders in Toronto’s Globe and Mail and lauded by blogger Richard Smith onVet Voice. The New York Times carried the AP story and the Washington Post ran a stage-setter, pre-speech exclusive interview the day before.
Brennan’s reasons for the death of this controversial phrase are right. It was always loony to declare war on an a tactic (noun or adjective) and reprehensible to send ever more of America’s youth abroad to pursue an elusive and ill-defined enemy (terror) in the name of a questionable “doctrine” that called for the invasion of another country that had not declared war on or otherwise harmed the US.
It amazes me, however, why the Obama administration needed to send a high level official representative to a major Washington-based think-tank to announce to the public and the press that a previous administration’s questionable doctrine – if you could even call it a doctrine – had been dropped several months ago from official US government vocabulary. I suppose the real reason was to flesh out the policies that are being implemented in GWOT’s place.
The Absence of Something Does Not Mean the Press and the Public Get It
You’d think the media would have picked up on GWOT’s demise well before August 6 – and some did - but I guess the administration decided that it needed to be spelled out again in no uncertain terms. Anyone who had read Obama’s speeches –beginning with his Inaugural Address – moving on to his April speech in Istanbul and then to his speech to the Muslim World in Cairo in June – should have noticed the rhetorical watershed that began on January 20. The Bush administration GWOT mantra was nowhere to be found in any of them.
This, it seems to me to be an accurate reflection of Obama’s foreign policy. It’s far from empty rhetoric despite what critics may claim. From what I’ve observed thus far, Obama has always viewed the world through different lenses than his less than illustrious predecessor or the neocons who led our ex-White House cowboy around by the nose throughout his tenure.
As I’ve previously observed here on WhirledView, GWOT has not given way to more GWOT. It has been replaced by the phrase global engagement or as Brennan said at CSIS “engagement with the world.” Read Obama’s speeches – as well as Brennan’s.
Global engagement is a conceptual sea-change in policy
Engagement is, in reality, a very different concept, a sea-change in approaching the rest of the world. It means - oh my gosh - talking to others with whom one does not necessarily agree. It means looking for ways to bridge differences, seeking allies and partners and along the way treating them with respect. It means focusing the military as well as other tools of US foreign policy on “disrupting, dismantling and defeating Al Qaida and its allies” who have declared war on the US and whose leadership is based in Pakistan’s tribal areas but whose leverage is enhanced through local terrorist groups in the Middle East and across East and North Africa. It means strengthening the civilian side of development assistance thereby reducing the military’s role in interacting with foreigners even in strife torn areas.
Global engagement also does not mean rhetorical saber-rattling or howling at the moon.
Above all it means understanding the many shades of gray that make for effective foreign policy that widen this country’s foreign policy options to keep America safe as opposed to shrink-wrapping them along the lines of the hallmark black and white “with us or agin us” closed view of the world of the previous eight years.
Hopefully the American public – and the media will catch on to these fundamental changes, That is if the crazies on the right and the left will sit down, cool off, shut up and start behaving like adults. The hard work has just begun.