“I much prefer talking with someone who is interested in understanding the situation and responding to it appropriately,”
John Brennan, president Obama’s counterterrorism advisor
In a lengthy article in the New York Times, Peter Baker reviewed the Obama approach to the war on terrorism, and especially as a continuation of Bush’s war.
Much has been said and written about Bush’s military and foreign policy, but, as the Obama administration has learned, some of it was worth keeping. Bush said early on that this was a long-term effort that required patience and persistence, would lead to setbacks and disappointments. Commentators pointed out that in order to win, all of the United States’s resources would be put to the test: military, diplomatic, technology, etc.
Under Obama, these premises are proven and re-emphasized. It’s less a matter of grand or decisive victories, but about being effective, nimble, and maintain constancy of purpose. The problem has changed and been redefined several times, the front line is not easily found, and there is no clear end point.
The New York Times article points out several factors that illustrate how the Obama administration is going about taming this wicked problem:
- Learning through immersion – Brennan notes that in one of his early meetings with Obama, it became clear that the president-to-be had taken the time to study many points of view on the war, and had reached his own conclusions, apparently through rigorous inductive reasoning. It also appears that Obama, throughout all this, has allowed new facts to challenge his conclusions, and has adapted his decision-making, possibly even his strategy accordingly.
- Path dependency related to the means chosen – it is interesting to note that both Bush (with time) and Obama (from the start) realized that the course of the war depended on the means with which they chose to fight it. It wasn’t just about the victors and defeats, but the methods themselves. Bush had already prohibited water torture and started dismantling Gitmo by the end of his term, and Obama confirmed these decisions and accelerated their implementation. By his own reckoning, one of Obama’s most important initiatives was an act of diplomacy, a speech to students in Cairo. In both of them, there was a realization that how the war was fought could profoundly affect the nature of the war.
- Making distinctions, particularly about stakeholders. A big issue in this war is, how do we characterize the enemy? Curiously, this seems to be a critically important semantic problem. Bush used his terms, Obama others, and yet it seems that the same people are being targeted, hunted, arrested or killed. Still, Bush described the enemy as a political ideology with demonic characteristics, whereas Obama sees terrorism as a tactic in a deeper conflict. This distinction, which may seem frivolous to many, makes a big difference in how you enlist stakeholders in your work.
- Being clear about trade-offs and the dimension of time. When confronted by civil rights groups about continuing Bush-era practices, Obama explained that other priorities weighed more heavily. The article notes that measures that ran counter to American civil liberties (John Adams’ Alien and Sedition Act and Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus inter alia) in times of national crisis were changed as a counteracting forces when the crisis passed.
What’s notable about these factors, and Obama’s problem-solving style in general, is that the issues are explicitly articulated, thereby opening for a richer, more pointed debate.
What remains to be seen, is whether Obama’s approach to the war has the right leverage: having understood that all problems can’t be solved at once, has the administration chosen a policy that targets the right measures at the right time?
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