Um artigo de Josh Gerstein, no POLITICO.com:
«“Rogue states” is being pushed aside in favor of the less confrontational “outliers.”
“Islamic radicalism” is being converted to the less religiously freighted “violent extremism.”
And in one of the most important speeches of his presidency, Barack Obama omitted a term that was the Bush administration’s obsession: terrorism – part of a larger effort to de-emphasize the problem in Obama's relations with Muslim states.
Diplomats, academics and foreign leaders are hotly debating whether Obama, who won the White House promising dramatic change in U.S. foreign policy, has actually changed much substantively. But there’s little question that he's made a pronounced shift in how the U.S. talks about the rest of the world – and in a way that has opened him up to charges of being soft in the face of America’s enemies.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) was so incensed at the administration’s recent step towards ending its use of the phrase “Islamic extremism” that he fired off a letter to Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan. Lieberman worries that if Obama doesn’t confront the true nature of the threat, he can’t stop it.
“The failure to identify our enemy for what it is—violent Islamist extremism— is offensive and contradicts thousands of years of accepted military and intelligence doctrine to ‘know your enemy,’” Lieberman wrote, later calling the decision “absolutely Orwellian” in a TV interview.
And Republicans have lined up to point to the rhetorical recalibrations as evidence that Obama is naïve and dangerously out of his depth.
“It’s evidence of a lack of seriousness in understanding the nature of the problem they face,” John Bolton, the Bush administration’s ambassador to the United Nations and frequent Obama critic, told POLITICO. “This administration is really ‘Innocents Abroad..’…It’s a dangerous policy for us. Obviously one word isn’t the Alpha and the Omega but it is another piece of evidence of the inexperience of this team.”
The White House often tries to downplay the changes, but observers say officials must expect that the linguistic shifts will have substantive impact - otherwise they wouldn’t bother with moves that leave Obama so vulnerable to criticism.
“They are taking a significant political risk when they do these kinds of things, when they make any kind of deviation from the status quo,” said Dan Drezner, a professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School. “These sorts of things generate all kinds of blowback. They have to think the blowback is worth it, otherwise making the changes would be both stupid and thankless.”
The administration defends the moves, saying that by needlessly antagonizing or alienating nations and groups, it can make it harder for the U.S. to build alliances against them.
That’s why Obama’s Muslim outreach speech included references to people who carry out violence – but without the word “terrorism,” which became almost a calling card of the Bush administration and its emphasis on the war on terror (a term even the Bush White House eventually dropped.)
At a recent briefing, the State Department defended the decision to move away from “Islamic radicalism.”
“We do confront a global movement of terrorists, violent extremists…. not all of them are Islamic. I think it would be a mistake to say that this is about one part of the world or one community,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said. “We oppose people who employ violence for political purposes regardless of where they are. And al-Qaida is working hard to extend its network to all corners of the world, including here in the United States.”
A shift from “rogue states” to “outliers” for Iran and North Korea could be more problematic for Obama.
In arms-control circles, “outliers” has traditionally been used to refer to those countries that never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: India, Pakistan and Israel. Under the Obama approach, Israel now finds itself lumped in with the mullahs in Tehran – its mortal enemies.
“Obviously, this administration views important countries, allies like India, Pakistan and Israel the same way it views North Korea and Iran,” said Morris Amitay, a former executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “This wasn’t a slip of the tongue. Obviously, we’re playing up to North Korea and Iran, saying ‘We really love you, even though you’re bad. We just want to be your friend.’ The mindset of this administration is utterly baffling.”
One close watcher of Israel’s nuclear program also found the new terminology about “outliers” unhelpful.
“It’s a poor choice,” said Avner Cohen, author of the forthcoming book, “The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb.” “Rogue states and outliers are conceptually very, very different. It is confusing.”
However, Robert Litwak, who worked on nonproliferation in the Clinton White, said he was pleased to see Obama jettisoning “rogue states.”
“It prevented diplomatic engagement because once these states were relegated to that category it really put them beyond the pale and demonized these states,” said Litwak, now director of international security studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “The term was getting in the way of U.S. policies and it was a lazy shorthand used in lieu of a differentiated policy to deal with each individual country.”
Senior Obama officials haven’t used the phrase “rogue states” much, but in recent days “outlier” has seen an uptick. Crowley has used it once in three press briefings this month. “We’re more concerned about how we keep nuclear technology and know-how out of the hands of outlier states and rogue elements,” Crowley said on April 7.
Obama himself used the term “outlier” in an interview with The New York Times about his nuclear posture review. “When you’re looking at outliers like Iran or North Korea, they should see that over the course of the last year and a half we have been executing a policy that will increasingly isolate them so long as they are operating outside of accepted international norms,” the president said.
White House aides said the de-emphasis of “rogue states” was deliberate. They were less clear about whether the replacement term was set in stone.
Some of Obama’s rhetorical changes are not as starkly different from the Bush administration as some critics suggest. For instance, Bush officials began talking of trading the “Global War on Terror” for the “Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism” as early as 2005. Bush initially resisted, but by the time he left office, “violent extremism” was the preferred term and the State Department was urging diplomats to downplay Al Qaeda’s religious component.
Brennan told students at New York University earlier this year that the administration believed it was important to choose its words properly and avoid instilling more fear.
“We’re trying to be very careful and precise in our use of language because I think the language we use and the images we project really do have resonance,” Brennan said in February. “That’s why I don’t use the term jihadist to refer to terrorists. It gives them religious legitimacy that they so desperately seek, but I ain’t going to give it to them.”
But some on the right disagree.
“This administration believes it can replace reality with words. And if it has the right words in the right order things will happen,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said recently at a breakfast organized by the American Spectator. “It’s almost like a medieval, philosophical argument, like alchemy, that if I can just work all these things out right, the world will transform itself to the world I want to live in.”
Lieberman also worries the shifting tone betrays a much more substantive problem.
“This is not honest,” Lieberman said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Three thousand Americans were killed not by some amorphous group of violent extremists or environmental extremists or white supremacist extremists. They were violent Islamist extremists motivated and organized by the ideology preached by Osama bin Laden.”
“And unless we're honest about that,” he said, “we're not going to be able to defeat this enemy.”»