Brose on Bush's farewell address

Hot off the presses. Read it here:

There was a time after 9/11 when America needed a president who saw the people who had just attacked us as a world-conquering, ideological counterweight to American liberalism. And Bush answered that call. Now, more than seven years on, we need to insist — without compromising one bit of our post-9/11 seriousness, vigilance, or willingness to defend ourselves — that by raising al-Qaeda and company to our level, we are only degrading ourselves while painting them as the very thing they aspire to be. Our enemy in this confrontation is a deviant bunch of bitter-enders, whose only ideas about organizing society have been rejected everywhere — everywhere — they’ve been forced on people. The sooner we start treating them as such the better. Bush could never accept that, let alone do it.

Others, however, can. And today, David Miliband offered a glimpse of what should come next. This, ironically, was the real speech of the day:

The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common, and the more we magnify the sense of threat. We should expose their claim to a compelling and overarching explanation and narrative as the lie that it is.

Miliband even spoke of his strategy as “disaggregation,” which is exactly the term Dave Kilcullen uses in this article, leading me to wonder who really wrote this speech. Either way, this is where Obama should pick up intellectually and policywise, but he should do so with all of the vigilance and single-mindedness of his predecessor.