The Speech

Interesting that there's love for Obama's speech from left and right, but with more members of the left falling out than the right, and more members of the right once again over-simplifying that the President somehow justified Bush-Cheneyism in his speech.

He didn't -- no preemptive war in the Iraq sense. No real American Exceptionalism to justify everything we do -- rule of law necessary here to keep us on the moral highground.

Here's Glenn Greenwald on the oddities of the (mostly) bipartisan phenomenon:

Indeed, Obama insisted upon what he called the "right" to wage wars "unilaterally"; articulated a wide array of circumstances in which war is supposedly "just" far beyond being attacked or facing imminent attack by another country; explicitly rejected the non-violence espoused by King and Gandhi as too narrow and insufficiently pragmatic for a Commander-in-Chief like Obama to embrace; endowed us with the mission to use war as a means of combating "evil"; and hailed the U.S. for underwriting global security for the last six decades (without mentioning how our heroic efforts affected, say, the people of Vietnam, or Iraq, or Central America, or Gaza, and so many other places where "security" is not exactly what our wars "underwrote"). So it's not difficult to see why Rovian conservatives are embracing his speech; so much of it was devoted to an affirmation of their core beliefs.

The more difficult question to answer is why -- given what Drum described -- so many liberals found the speech so inspiring and agreeable? Is that what liberals were hoping for when they elected Obama: someone who would march right into Oslo and proudly announce to the world that we have a unilateral right to wage war when we want and to sing the virtues of war as a key instrument for peace? As Tom Friedman put it on CNN yesterday: "He got into their faces . . . I'm for getting into the Europeans' face." Is that what we needed more of?

The New York Times is one of the speech supporters:

Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday, President Obama gave the speech he needed to give, but we suspect not precisely the one the Nobel committee wanted to hear...

...In a speech that was both somber and soaring, he returned again and again to Afghanistan, arguing that the war was morally just and strategically necessary to defend the United States and others from more terrorist attacks.

In a moving passage, he invoked the memories of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., saying that without Dr. King’s vision, leadership and sacrifice, he never would have been standing at that lectern in Oslo.

But he said he could not be guided by their examples alone. “For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”

I keep asking all of my friends who think Obama shouldn't have ordered the 30,000 additional troops to Afghanstan if they believe withdrawal was the answer. Otherwise, Obama chose the best option. But if you truly believe there is nothing more to be gained there, no threat now or future that we can stem by changing our strategy from the Bush-Cheney one (whatever it was -- belligerent neglect?), then fine, it's up to Obama (or Osama, with another 9/11-type attack, God forbid) to prove you wrong.

I'll end with a less sanguine quote from Professor Juan Cole's post on the speech, a different kind of warning:

Obama has yet to decide whether he is a visionary or a technocrat. The prize committee hoped for the former. In this speech they got the latter.

One month from now will be one year in with Obama, and State of the Union time.

And with it come the first legitimate judgments.