Lund, Sweden.
President Obama’s speech was a record low in terms of moral and intellectual analysis: What it boils down to is war – i.e. killing every single ISIS person anywhere, people who he compares to cancer cells.
The war on terror has always been about killing terrorists but you can not kill an ism – terrorism. To do something about the causes that compel people to become terrorists would be much more efficient.
The President has said repeatedly that a lasting solution is political, not military. The speech, however, is exclusively military – not a word of political, psychological or other insights: No, we kill people because we think it is wrong to kill people…
The speech can be seen as a proof of how utterly misguided the U.S. response to 9/11 was – had it been more intelligence and less revenge-oriented, there would neither have been a devastating Iraq war nor an ISIS.
It’s difficult to be Number One in a rank order. You ony teach downward. If you are Number Twenty, there are 19 others to learn from. It seems as if the United States, inside its exceptionalist box, is now unable to learn lessons.
Obama’s ‘strategy’ for The War On Terror will, in all likelihood, lead to more terrorism and hatred of the West – I mean what will frustrated Sunnis in Iraq think about Obama? Or the Syrian civil society that doesn’t carry arms?
Not a word about international law presumably because bombing other countries is aggression when there is no threat and the ‘US is more safe today than then’.
There is a remarkable sentence where the President says that in two weeks he himself will chair a meeting of the UN Security Council! What?! Can any head of state do that??
Further, not a word about Washington’s long-term vision for a better Middle East – indicative of the absence of any such vision.
The last 2 minutes are perhaps the most interesting: A combination of unbearable self-praise, slight megalomania and denial of the changing U.S. role in our changing world.
If this is American leadership at its best – and that’s what the President believes – the world as we know it may soon crumble.
Jan Oberg is the founder of Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research.
