Saying the Right Thing at the Right Time

People worry about all sorts of things, and the rankings of common phobias never change – 1) Fear of public speaking (Glossophobia), 2) Fear of death (Necrophobia), 3) Fear of spiders (Arachnophobia), 4) Fear of darkness (Achluophobia, Scotophobia or Myctophobia), 5) Fear of heights (Acrophobia) and so on. Fear of flying is a distant seventh and claustrophobia tenth. And maybe that is why people distrust politicians, televangelists and anyone in an infomercial. Those are the folks who thrive on public speaking – they live and die by it. That’s not only what they do, by choice, of all things, but they seem to love it. They’re weird.

But we recognize great speeches, as infrequent as they are. Every kid learns the Gettysburg Address, and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech may have changed America. And every heroic movie has its inspiring before-the-big-battle Saint Crispin’s Day Speech – “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” – Aragon at the gates of Mordor, or the fighter-pilot president leading his ragtag band of bungling fliers against the aliens from outer space (no, really). We all know words matter, even if someone else, not us, should be the one to speak them.

And we don’t want to be cheated. We expect the right words for the right occasion, as with the speech Peggy Noonan wrote for Reagan to deliver after the Challenger Disaster:

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”

That was a home run – just the right thing to say. A great speech doesn’t explain, it expresses – it gives form to unsettling vague feelings we can’t quite explain or even comprehend, cloudy half-formed feelings that disturb us, until we have the words that allow us to think about what just happened. A great speech provides more than comfort or inspiration – it provides relief, relief from having deep emotions but not knowing what to think, or even how to think about whatever it is. Peggy Noonan knew that.

And that made Tuesday, November 10, 2009, as interesting day, as Barack Obama got his chance, as the Associated Press reported in Obama Salutes Fort Hood Victims, Promises Justice:

FORT HOOD, Texas - Somberly reciting 13 names and 13 stories, President Barack Obama saluted the Americans killed at this Army post as heroes who died for their country – and promised a nation demanding answers that “the killer will be met with justice.”

Of course the AP missed the point. Did he put into words what people felt but didn’t have the words to explain?

Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. The White House transcript of what he said is here – Remarks by the President at Memorial Service at Fort Hood Fort Hood – III Corps, Fort Hood, Texas. But words on the page (or screen) are not the whole thing, and the video shows more here (introduction), here (body of the speech) and here (taps and final ceremonies).

It was pretty impressive, and at Political Wire you find Obama’s Best Speech Ever:

President Obama’s speech at Fort Hood may go down as one of his best ever. The president was able to balance his duties as Commander in Chief while consoling a nation in the aftermath of a terrible tragedy. That he was able to do this while taking away the focus on the shooter’s religion was even more impressive.

It was one of those speeches that make you especially proud to be an American.

And that cites Marc Ambinder:

I guarantee: they’ll be teaching this one in rhetoric classes. It was that good. My gloss won’t do it justice. Yes, I’m having a Chris Matthews-chill-running-up-my-leg moment, but sometimes, the man, the moment and the words come together and meet the challenge. Obama had to lead a nation’s grieving; he had to try and address the thorny issues of Islam and terrorism; to be firm; to express the spirit of America, using familiar, comforting tropes in a way that didn’t sound trite.

And there was MSNBC’s Chuck Todd – “That’s going to be a speech that’s remembered and quoted from for quite some time; struck a balance of commander and consoler; not easy.”

Slate’s John Dickerson calls it President Obama’s small masterpiece of a speech in What He Said:

Less than three minutes into the speech, the president was telling the story of each of the 13 people who had died. The news has been full of every last detail about the shooter. Obama corrected that balance. If the shooter committed the ultimate act of selfishness, then the president took it as his task to bear witness to the selflessness and hard work of the shooter’s victims.

It seemed Obama turned the tables, refusing to talk much about bad guys, as he seemed to think that the stories of the dead and those who tried to save them mattered the most here, and that was almost half of the text.

But it played to his strength:

Storytelling is Obama’s best talent. It’s what worked for him so well in the campaign. Telling stories is effective because it follows the simple rule of good writing: Show, don’t tell. You can talk about dedication and selflessness; or you can tell the story of Amber Bahr, who “was so intent on helping others that she did not realize for some time that she, herself, had been shot in the back,” or the story of Francisco de la Serna, who treated the police officer who ran toward the gunfire as well as the gunman who was trying to kill her.

And you don’t play on fear of all Muslims, or lecture folks about how they’re not all bad, really:

The president only briefly referred to the killer’s faith. He did not take the opportunity to deliver a politically correct lesson about grouping people or about religion. He did not, as David Brooks wrote today, “rush to therapy.” Instead the president delivered the opposite of that: judgment. “This much we do know – no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice – in this world, and the next.” That’s not something George Bush could ever have said.

And he was, above all else, appropriate:

Obama knew this wasn’t the moment to defend Islam. He also knew to keep out of the speech any lessons about reacting in anger – the kind of lessons Bill Clinton sought to convey in his speech after the bombing of Oklahoma City. He left these things out because they were beside the point. The speech was relentlessly focused on celebrating the fallen and what they represent – not just in their reaction to the shooting but on the sacrifices they had willingly endured. “In an age of selfishness, they embody responsibility. In an era of division, they call upon us to come together. In a time of cynicism, they remind us of who we are as Americans.”

So no lectures about being reasonable about good Muslims, or chest-thumping about how we’d now kill them all – this was about those we lost, good people, the best of who we are, and about who we, those still standing, are. And it was a pep talk of a sort, for the current generation:

The first president of the post-Baby Boomer generation was making the claim for the men and women he commands – a host of whom he will send into Afghanistan in the coming weeks. “We need not look to the past for greatness, because it is before our very eyes.”

It was a song of America’s values, sung by a man who has been questioned, since the Democratic primaries, for being, as Hillary Clinton’s strategist Mark Penn put it, “not fundamentally American.” During the campaign, he had to make television ads insisting he shared American values. As president, he has contended with opponents who compare him with Hitler because of his … health care plan. Today’s speech is unlikely to mollify his most ardent foes, and it won’t make health care reform any easier. But it should make it harder for anyone to question his patriotism.

But Dickerson was right about this speech not mollifying Obama’s most ardent foes. See Jack Moss – Sorry Obama – Your Words are just that – Words – He doesn’t believe any of it.

The general idea was that if Obama chafed about these soldiers, or any of our soldiers, he’d send twenty divisions into Afghanistan tomorrow, giving McChrystal ten times over what McChrystal requested, and anytime we happened to accidently kill a few hundred civilians, he’d not even mention it, much less apologize to any widows or children and that sort of thing. Thus Moss says Obama “has no right to speak for me or any other soldier serving this country.” You see, Obama really has no right to be president. Moss doesn’t want chest-thumping about how we’ll now kill them all. He wants a president who will kill them all. And he wanted Obama to rip the Fort Hood shooter a new asshole.

Moss seems to think the speech was just fine otherwise, in its way, saying nice things about the dead – but he knows that Obama doesn’t believe a word of it. You have to understand what Obama is secretly thinking, not what he says in words, or even what he does, as Obama very well may send forty thousand more troops to Afghanistan. If he does, he won’t mean it, or something. And he should have called for the crowd at the ceremony to storm the base hospital and lynch this Fort Hood shooter, or something. It’s not exactly clear.

But what Moss says may be counterproductive. In Foreign Policy, see Marc Lynch on the Fort Hood shootings:

The grand strategy of al-Qaeda and its affiliated ideologues is, and has always been, to generate a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West which does not currently exist. Their great challenge is that the vast majority of Muslims reject their theology, ideology, strategy and tactics. That’s especially true of American Muslims. They therefore feel the need to change the environment in which Muslims live in order to change their calculations about the appropriateness of extremist identities and ideologies and actions.

Terrorism is a means towards that end. The object is to create a violent, polarized environment in which Muslims are forced to embrace a narrow, extreme version of Muslim identity. They want Muslims to accept a master narrative in which the Islamic umma is existentially threatened by Western aggression, and the only theologically and strategically appropriate individual response is to join the jihad in the path of god (as they have defined it).

So Moss and his buddies are helping them:

A lot of people – some well-meaning, some clowns or worse – evidently want the American response to the Ft. Hood shootings to revive the post-9/11 “war of ideas” and “clash of civilizations” anti-Islamic discourse. It’s a jihad, they shout, demanding careful scrutiny of the loyalty of American Muslims. That’s what they seem to mean by the demand to throw away “political correctness” and confront the ideological menace. The overall effect of their recommendations, however, would be to revive the flagging al-Qaeda brand and to greatly strengthen the appeal of its narrative. And that’s exactly what we should not want.

As for the Fort Hood shooter, there is Dana Priest’s summary of this document from Hasan, a presentation delivered some months ago:

The title of Hasan’s PowerPoint presentation was “The Koranic World View as It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.” It consisted of 50 slides. In one slide, Hasan described the presentation’s objectives as identifying “what the Koran inculcates in the minds of Muslims and the potential implications this may have for the U.S. military.”

He also sought to “describe the nature of the religious conflicts that Muslims” who serve in the U.S. military may have and to persuade the Army to identify these individuals.

Other slides delved into the history of Islam, its tenets, statistics about the number of Muslims in the military, and explanations of “offensive jihad,” or holy war.

Another slide suggested ways to draw out Muslim troops: “It must be hard for you to balance Islamic beliefs that might be conflicting with current war; feelings of guilt; Is it what you expected.”

The idea is that some things had to be worked out, and the final page, labeled “Recommendation,” contained only one suggestion – “Department of Defense should allow Muslim Soldiers the option of being released as ‘Conscientious objectors’ to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events.”

Andrew Sullivan says that it seems to him that Hasan was airing an important debate:

I don’t glean from the notes for his lecture that he was necessarily an Islamist fanatic – merely that he could see how Islam could be seen as incompatible with military service in Iraq and Afghanistan. His view is pretty close to what many critics of Islam argue. Of course, the power-points cannot convey the tone of content of his actual remarks, so I may be wrong. But as a piece of analysis, it’s admirably candid and very clear about Islam’s total rejection of a separation between church and state. It seems to me from this evidence that his looming deployment, and the impossibility of a conscientious discharge, were contributing factors to his mass murder. The lecture almost reads like a cry for help, rather than a warning.

But Hasan knew that he lived in a world of people who don’t want a debate about Islam, people like Pat Robertson:

World domination … is the ultimate aim. And they talk about infidels and all this, but the truth is that’s what the game is. So you are dealing with not a religion. You’re dealing with a political system. And I think we should treat it as such and treat its adherences as such as we would members of the Communist Party or members of some fascist group.

One of Sullivan’s readers is a little more clear-headed:

There is no end to the War on Terror and no way to prevent a 9/11 from happening again.

What I like about Obama is that he is trying to change how we view this conflict – it isn’t nation vs. nation or ideology vs. ideology but rather an effort to get the US out of the role of “The Great Satan” – that role is a great recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and others, and unfortunately there are a seemingly endless supply of volunteers/suicide bombers. It will be a tough mission but one that can and will pay dividends if he is given the time (and support) to execute it.

Alternately, we can spend trillions of dollars and lose thousands of lives (US and others) – but we won’t win as there isn’t a “loser” in this fight.

But Hasan was a terrorist! Or he wasn’t, depending on how you look at it, and Glenn Greenwald questions whether the Fort Hood shooting was terrorism:

If one accepts that broadened definition of “terrorism” - that it includes violence that targets not only civilians but also combatants who are unarmed or not engaged in combat at the time of the attack – it seems impossible to exclude from that term many of the acts in which the U.S. and our allies routinely engage. Indeed, a large part of our “war” strategy is to kill people we deem to be “terrorists” or “combatants” without regard to whether they’re armed or engaged in hostilities at the moment we kill them. Isn’t that exactly what we do when we use drone attacks in Pakistan?

Oddly, from the far right, Jonah Goldberg agrees:

I am very uncomfortable with the idea that I might sound like I’m trying to diminish the guy’s crimes. He committed treason and murder. It was a cowardly act. If we are at war, then it was a war crime.

But calling it terrorism “might move us into dangerous territory.”

In Pakistan, we launch missiles at people’s homes with civilians in or around them to take out al-Qaeda leadership. The attacks are – hopefully – always intended to be something of a surprise. But I wouldn’t call that terrorism. I’m just uncomfortable with the word terrorism metastasizing into “anything the bad guys do to us.” Why not call what Hasan did a war crime? Terrorism is a war crime but not all war crimes are terrorism.

Of course, the fact that Jihadis reject all of the rules of war makes it very difficult to figure out how to even talk about the rules. (Just out of curiosity, what would the legal definition be of, say, a Japanese officer turning on fellow Japanese troops during World War Two in the apparent hope of aiding the Allies?)

That’s an interesting what-if thought experiment. Goldberg says “we could spend some more time thinking a bit more rigorously about our vocabulary.”

Well yes, words matter. And Matthew Yglesias complicates things more:

The terrorism fears around this subject should also remind us that the fear of a “safe haven” in Afghanistan continues to be an under-scrutinized concept. Suppose there had been a terrorist plot here? What role would a safe haven have played in it? The key assets Hasan had, from the point of view of committing acts of violence against Americans, were access to weapons and a physical location inside the United States of America.

And that leads Sullivan to go back to 9/11:

We assume that we have understood that event by now. And I once thought I did. It was a declaration of war and we had to fight back. We went to Afghanistan and removed the Taliban regime; we went to Iraq to prevent al Qaeda getting WMDs and to open up a democratic space where Islamism would falter. I supported both responses.

I worry now as we peer through the wreckage that we were simply trying to make our enemy a conventional one, so that we could defeat them by conventional means. Invade a country; change a regime; even use the military for endless attempts at nation-building to “drain the swamp” that brings terror to our cities. We’d beat them that way, wouldn’t we? Our power was unrivaled, wasn’t it?

But that just didn’t work out:

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has been empowered by the long occupation and the government is as corrupt as ever and fast losing its own people. Al Qaeda have simply moved to Pakistan where they remain safely as long as they duck drone attacks. In Iraq, we actually gave al Qaeda a new opening and had to spend billions and lose thousands of lives to push them back. Even now, we have no guarantee they will not re-emerge in a still deeply divided country when far fewer American troops will soon remain. And through all this, we threw away one core advantage: our moral high ground. Through torture and the mass killings of civilians, through allowing sectarian genocide in Iraq and giving the world Abu Ghraib and Gitmo as symbols of the new America, we even managed to blur the lines between civilization and barbarism. And in this struggle, our political leaders failed to keep the country united, or the alliance intact.

It seems that what 9/11 revealed, and what it was probably designed to reveal, is that there is nothing we can really do definitively to stop another 9/11:

They had no weapons but our own technology. The training they had was not that sophisticated and the costs of the operation were relatively tiny. There were 19 of them. None of the key perpetrators has been brought to justice. Bin Laden remains at large. If you calculate the costs of that evil attack against the financial, moral and human costs of the fight back, 9/11 was a fantastic demonstration of the power of asymmetry to destroy the West.

Everything that has subsequently transpired has merely deepened that lesson. The US is now bankrupt, trapped in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of our lives, unable even to prevent the two most potentially dangerous Islamist states, Pakistan and Iran, from getting nukes, morally compromised and hanging on to global support only because of a new president who is even now being assaulted viciously at home for such grievous crimes as trying to get more people access to health insurance.

In short, we have done nothing to show that we can really win this war by the methods we have used so far, and “the biggest blow to al Qaeda as a global brand has not been what we have done to them, but what they have done to themselves, by their flagrant violence against fellow Muslims, their nihilism, and their barbaric brutality.” And we didn’t do that. They did.

And things just got worse:

And now, in the wake of Fort Hood, we face the possibility of radicalizing Muslims in America and polarizing more Americans against them. This does not help. Sure, it is not easy – countering real Islamist danger without provoking more of it. And it is not fair that this monstrous religious terror should exist at all in a free society that did nothing to deserve its attack. But it is what it is. …

As American politics itself curdles some more into the core divide between fundamentalism and liberalism, the impact of the post-9/11 century deepens. And the murderous marketers of divine certainty make progress – at home and abroad.

And to that end, see an item from the day of the Obama speech from the St. Petersburg Times:

A Marine reservist armed with a tire iron beat and chased a man he thought was an Arab terrorist and even called 911 to say he was detaining the man, police said.

But the man he assaulted was actually a Greek Orthodox priest visiting from overseas who spoke limited English, police said. …

The guy needed some help on the road:

Instead of offering help, Bruce struck the priest on the head with a tire iron, police said.

Ah, this may take more than one speech. But there are just words, and then there are Just Words.