We are in the second week of March, and the embarrassments show no sign of abating. On March 3rd, the president stated that the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi must go -- or, in the preferred euphemism of the moment, that he "needs to step down" -- and must do it "now." What could that mean? How does Obama propose to make it stick?
Even for a president who, in the realms of war and peace, is apt to imagine his words weigh more than other people's actions, there are some words that sound so much like actions you should take care not to speak them too emphatically. But never mind: officials in the State Department and at the White House, we are told, have come across a subtler way of expressing themselves than the Bush-Cheney administration which spoke so crudely of "regime change." They now speak of "regime alteration."
Lives and deaths may actually hang on words like these. We think of ourselves as the patron country of democracy in a world that wants to be patronized, but there are other ways of looking at the United States, and other ways of looking at patronage. Samuel Johnson completed his great Dictionary of the English Language in 1755 without financial backers from the aristocracy. When Lord Chesterfield arrived late on the scene to offer his help, Johnson replied in a letter that has become famous: "Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?"
Barack Obama, Frank Wisner, and Hillary Clinton were, in exactly that sense, patrons of the struggle for liberty by the people of Egypt. We embarrass other countries with our help, and it is only natural that we stumble. We are sleepwalking in someone else's house.
David Bromwich is editor of a selection of Edmund Burke's speeches, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform, and co-editor of the Yale University Press edition of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books , the London Review of Books , and the Huffington Post. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Bromwich discusses how President Obama's personality affects the way he reacts to crises, click here, or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2011 David Bromwich
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