by Michael Blim
And so the speech, the “just war” speech is given. Or rather “the cold war” speech is given.
President Obama’s Oslo Nobel acceptance speech, that is. It could have been given by John F. Kennedy. It could have been written by Kennedy’s Sorenson, Goodwin, or Schlesinger, filled as it was with allusions to freedom, liberty, tyranny, and the need to defend the vital center. It was all there: America the underwriter of world security and the keeper of world peace since World War II, the historic champion of democracy even when compared with Johnny-come-lately Europe, the everlasting voice for universal human aspirations.
Tough-minded idealism, cold war realism. The United States, the President says, goes to war to defend its interests only when its cause is just. Afghanistan is a war of self-defense, and thus is just. Other wars undertaken while we have protected the peace these last sixty year have been just too, and they include the first Iraq War and the Balkan wars against Serbia. Missing from the ledger of the just are the Korean, Vietnam, and Second Iraq Wars, though American action in the Korean War is still so unquestioned that its costs and consequences lie unexamined.
We live, the President tells us, in an imperfect world. In a breathtaking claim upon human nature and humanity’s history, he argues that we as a species knew war before we knew peace, and accepted war as another fact of life “like drought and disease.” Though our natures remain warlike, and evil and injustice a constant of the human condition, he believes that we have made halting steps toward the rule of reason as well as a greater human interest in governing our conduct, especially during the American half-century.
Obama’s is a profoundly Christian vision, though a less Manichean outlook than was characteristic of the hot Cold War. The persistence of evil, however, is still its center. Humanity must hope for redemption but persevere in the face of life’s inevitable iniquities. Like Browning, he argues, “that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”
Applying the pilgrim’s progress to war can be both deadly and deceiving. Deadly because devotion makes a casualty of proportion, and memory becomes millennial. The march of human progress makes even terrible human tragedy and mendacity small.