[Peace-discuss] "Why should I carry lies abroad?"

[C. G. Estabrook]

Perhaps the only accurate account of Obama's speech yesterday in the morning 
papers is from (one of) the NYT's (& PBS') right-wing columnists, David Brooks 
(below). He rightly sees that Obama "has grown accustomed to putting on this 
sort of saccharine show" and that Obama's only substantive point was to call for 
German help in killing people in Afghanistan.  (Brooks unfortunately thinks that 
Obama's criminal policy was "the best paragraph of the speech.")  --CGE

========

	The New York Times
	July 25, 2008
	Op-Ed Columnist
	Playing Innocent Abroad
	By DAVID BROOKS

Radical optimism is America’s contribution to the world. The early settlers 
thought America’s founding would bring God’s kingdom to earth. John Adams 
thought America would emancipate “the slavish part of mankind all over the 
earth.” Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush preached their own gospels of world 
democracy.

Barack Obama is certainly a true American. In the first major foreign policy 
speech of his campaign, delivered in Chicago last year, he vowed a comprehensive 
initiative to “ensure that every child, everywhere, is taught to build and not 
to destroy.” America, he said, must promote dignity across the world, not just 
democracy. It must “lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the 
ultimate good.”

In Berlin on Thursday, it was more of the same. Speaking before a vast throng 
(and a surprising number of Yankees hats), he vowed to help “remake the world.” 
He offered hope that a history-drenched European continent could “choose its own 
tomorrow free from the shadows of yesterday.” He envisioned “a new dawn in the 
Middle East.”

Obama’s tone was serious. But he pulled out his “this is our moment” rhetoric 
and offered visions of a world transformed. Obama speeches almost always have 
the same narrative arc. Some problem threatens. The odds are against the forces 
of righteousness. But then people of good faith unite and walls come tumbling 
down. Obama used the word “walls” 16 times in the Berlin speech, and in 11 of 
those cases, he was talking about walls coming down.

The Berlin blockade was thwarted because people came together. Apartheid ended 
because people came together and walls tumbled. Winning the cold war was the 
same: “People of the world,” Obama declared, “look at Berlin, where a wall came 
down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too 
great for a world that stands as one.”

When I first heard this sort of radically optimistic speech in Iowa, I have to 
confess my American soul was stirred. It seemed like the overture for a new yet 
quintessentially American campaign.

But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship of Iowa has 
given way to the post-nationalism of Berlin, and it turns out that the vague 
overture is the entire symphony. The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion 
of hard choices strikes one more.

When John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan went to Berlin, their rhetoric soared, 
but their optimism was grounded in the reality of politics, conflict and hard 
choices. Kennedy didn’t dream of the universal brotherhood of man. He drew lines 
that reflected hard realities: “There are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, 
we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin.” Reagan didn’t call 
for a kumbaya moment. He cited tough policies that sparked harsh political 
disagreements — the deployment of U.S. missiles in response to the Soviet SS-20s 
— but still worked.

In Berlin, Obama made exactly one point with which it was possible to disagree. 
In the best paragraph of the speech, Obama called on Germans to send more troops 
to Afghanistan.

The argument will probably fall on deaf ears. The vast majority of Germans 
oppose that policy. But at least Obama made an argument.

Much of the rest of the speech fed the illusion that we could solve our problems 
if only people mystically come together. We should help Israelis and 
Palestinians unite. We should unite to prevent genocide in Darfur. We should 
unite so the Iranians won’t develop nukes. Or as Obama put it: “The walls 
between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew 
cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.”

The great illusion of the 1990s was that we were entering an era of global 
convergence in which politics and power didn’t matter. What Obama offered in 
Berlin flowed right out of this mind-set. This was the end of history on acid.

Since then, autocracies have arisen, the competition for resources has grown 
fiercer, Russia has clamped down, Iran is on the march. It will take politics 
and power to address these challenges, the two factors that dare not speak their 
name in Obama’s lofty peroration.

The odd thing is that Obama doesn’t really think this way. When he gets down to 
specific cases, he can be hard-headed. Last year, he spoke about his affinity 
for Reinhold Niebuhr, and their shared awareness that history is tragic and 
ironic and every political choice is tainted in some way.

But he has grown accustomed to putting on this sort of saccharine show for the 
rock concert masses, and in Berlin his act jumped the shark. His words drift far 
from reality, and not only when talking about the Senate Banking Committee. His 
Berlin Victory Column treacle would have made Niebuhr sick to his stomach.

Obama has benefited from a week of good images. But substantively, optimism 
without reality isn’t eloquence. It’s just Disney.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/25/opinion/25brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin