The shadows of the former administration couldn't be missed. The 'surge' strategy hovered over the policy lines, and so does the strategy of alliance with the Sunni Awakening Councils, who wreaked havoc on al-Qaida in Iraq.
"I have already ordered the deployment of 17,000 troops" in Afghanistan, Obama said, adding that "later this spring we will deploy approximately 4,000 U.S. troops to train Afghan security forces."
However, Obama presented his surge as a way of correcting the former president's mistakes. In three of the four times he mentioned Iraq, he was emphasizing the same point.
"Afghanistan has been denied the resources that it demands because of the war in Iraq."
"Those resources have been denied because of the war in Iraq."
"America must no longer deny resources to Afghanistan because of the war in Iraq."
Nonetheless, Iraq is about success as well and even Obama had to admit it.
"In Iraq, we had success in reaching out to former adversaries to isolate and target al-Qaida. We must pursue a similar process in Afghanistan...."
Not only the strategy borrowed some pages from George W. Bush's Iraq strategy, in some lines it echoed the 43rd president's most defining rhetoric. "[T]o the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same: we will defeat you," Obama said in a modified form of Bush's terrorists-you-and-us template while repeating his own inaugural address message:
"... for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you."
At that time, terror was only mentioned once and without the suffix -ism, and the speech was immediately dubbed as the "end of war on terror" declaration.
Well, it was prematurely labeled as such.
In Obama's Afghanistan-Pakistan policy speech, terror, terrorists and terror attacks were mentioned 12 times, 9/11 four times and its custodians, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, were mentioned by their names. More interestingly, Obama sent a clearer message that this war is afoot.
"The people of Pakistan want the same things that we want: an end to terror" he said stressing the fact that this war is still far from being concluded.
If so, then how the end of war on terror popped up?
In addition to the inaugural address, this argument gained grounds as the story of a message that was sent to senior Pentagon staff explaining that the current administration prefers to avoid using the term "long war" or "global war on terror" unfolded.
The Washington Post reported that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requested that federal employees refrain from using the Bush administration term "global war on terrorism." OMB director Peter Orszag dismissed the story.
Similarly, when asked about this message, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said he doesn't know of any language "that has been passed around." He added, though, that Obama is less concerned with "the phraseology" than he is about the "steps that he's taken and that we need to take as a country to protect our citizens."
Gibbs's sentence about the president's lack of concern with "phraseology" couldn't be more disconnected from reality. Obama, at the end is a person of words. He is a former candidate who brilliantly architected his campaign around the power of words.
This, obviously, is not being said in the Clintonian fashion during the Democratic party nomination race.
"Don't tell me words don't matter," Obama said once to Wisconsin Democrats in retaliation to Hillary Clinton's attacks on him that all he had to offer at that point of time was words.
"'I have a dream' - just words. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' - just words. 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself' - just words. Just speeches," he went on saying.
In his memoir "Dreams from My Father," written at age 34 prior to being a politician, Obama provides his reader with the most insightful phrase on his belief in words. "If I could just find the right words ... everything could change," he wrote.
It is only in this sense, the sense of wording and phrasing, that one could comprehend the suggestion of the end of war on terror, while Obama himself is offering so much evidence to the contrary. It is, at best, the end of phrase, not the end of a phase.
The Washington Post wrote the following on Jan 23: "President Obama yesterday eliminated the most controversial tools employed by his predecessor against terrorism suspects. ... While Obama says he has no plans to diminish counterterrorism operations abroad, the notion that a president can circumvent long-standing U.S. laws simply by declaring war was halted by executive order in the Oval Office."
Although, the paper got it right, it got it wrong in the title. This is not ending the war on terror, it is rather coming with it to maturity.
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