Tethered Swimming

There was no six column headline in the New York Times.  No television channels interrupted their regularly scheduled programming.  Internet aggregators did not spike the story to the top of their pages.  No nurses were kissed; no embassies were evacuated.  Nevertheless, the War on Terror, a.k.a. The Long War, a.k.a. World War IV, a.k.a. the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism passed into history last week.

There were hints of this months ago, but last Thursday it finally happened.  In a speech to a think tank, far from the glare of live television or mass audiences, John Brennan, a White House aide on security issues, announced that it was over.  The story in The Washington Independent has all sorts of rich, chewy details:

• Brennan said Obama will subordinate counterterrorism to “its right and proper place” as a “vital part” of the administration’s national security and foreign policies, but not the lion’s share of them.
• Above all, Brennan emphasized that the United States was not locked in a struggle with the world’s billion Muslims. He derided al-Qaeda’s self-presentation as a “highly organized, global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate,” and said that the administration would abandon the use of the word “jihad” in reference to al-Qaeda, since the term carries “religious legitimacy” in the Muslim world that al-Qaeda’s “murderers… desperately seek but in no way deserve.”
• “Any comprehensive approach has to also address the upstream factors — the conditions that help fuel violent extremism,” Brennan said. Military, intelligence or law-enforcement actions are unable to confront those conditions, which he said include the “basic needs and legitimate grievances of ordinary people” for prosperity, education, “dignity and worth,” and security. “If we fail to confront the broader political, economic, and social conditions in which extremists thrive, then there will always be another recruit in the pipeline, another attack coming downstream,” Brennan said.

Imagine that, a government official talking about al-Qaeda as something other than a globe spanning super group of ultra-terrorists.  There’s plenty more nutritious non-insanity in the rest of the piece.

Now, it’s easy to dismiss this as mere symbolism, little more than token words and cosmetic changes.  But many great things begin with symbolism.  In this case, what it hopefully means is a gradual, almost unconscious, unclenching of the communal American sphincter.  A relaxation of the knee jerk fears, stoked and mollycoddled by the federal government for seven and a half years, would have profound effects.  For one, it might allow us to reintroduce some sanity into domestic security policies like airport screening and border controls.  For another it might create domestic political space for diplomacy instead of vilification, for statecraft instead of invasions and endless (real) wars.

Certainly it is not difficult to produce counterexamples to this happy sentiment.  Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan.  He has made drone attacks inside Pakistan routine.  (A year ago they were a secret, now they barely make the news.)  He has retained some of the more odious civil liberties policies of his predecessor.  None of these things can be dismissed and it seems very likely that they will all have negative long term consequences.

While those things inevitably diminish sentiments like those expressed in Brennan’s speech, they don’t totally negate them.  And moving the “center” of American politics away from a war-centric framework isn’t an overnight project.  It took years to condition the American public into reflexively supporting any politician or movement that promised to kill as many terrorists as possible and it’s going to take years to undo.

I don’t know what the practical implications of this are going to be and there’s a distinct possibility that it’s all bullshit, that it will never filter down into day to day American life.  But in this case reality and facts are on the side of the angels because the overwhelming majority of Americans are never going to come under any kind of real threat from terrorists of any stripe.  So while FOX News, talk radio, internet wingnuts and all the rest will undoubtedly continue to pump national security fears into people’s homes they’re going to have to do it without help from the Executive Branch.  The government’s credibility is no longer on their side and without it a lot their wild threats will inevitably seem less ominous.  That should result in the overall levels of security related paranoia decreasing, and that’s an unambiguously good thing.

So it’s worth noting Brennan’s little speech and it’s worth applauding the worldview it lays out.  It’s a good first step and I hope it sticks.