Last night, US President Barack Obama delivered a much anticipated speech in front of cadets at West Point outlining his strategy for moving forward in the Afghan theatre of war.  The president surprised some audiences by announcing, along with a 30,000 troop increase (and its $30 billion price tag), an eighteen month roadmap for withdrawal from both Iraq and Afghanistan.  The move appeared to be an attempt to mollify the president's critics on both right and left, and-it's worth noting-tipped the White House's hand on its 2012 re-electoral strategy.  Withdrawal from both theatres conveniently coincides with what will be the president's bid to re-up in the Oval Office during the summer of 2011-the height of the presidential campaign season. 

Reaction to the president's speech was mixed. Advocates for immediate and total withdrawal were predictably shrill in their denunciation of Obama's imperial ambitions.  So were the equally silly critics to the president's far right who maintain a distaste for what they see as the president's lily-livered apprehension of unleashing the mighty ass-kicking powers over the long-haul of what they must think is an unstressed United States military.  Of course, the American centrist establishment fulfilled its political obligations by offering its stamp of approval in varying degrees of enthusiasm, assembling an army of talking heads to dominate the cable news shows in support of the president.  And then there were the space cadets that found themselves shocked by the president's announced escalation even after Obama spent the better part of two years campaigning on the promise to do just this.       

But regardless of where one falls down on the president's plan, Obama's argument offered an alarming instance of a growing trend in world politics-namely, the emergence of a sort-of sovereign doublethink, for lack of a better terminology.  George Orwell sketched the broad outlines of what this looks like in 1984:

"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself-that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.  

The most egregious examples of this sovereign doublethink emerged in the days following the attacks of September 11.  As part of its ambitious state of exception domestic and foreign policy agenda, the Bush administration repeatedly argued that it was rolling back civil liberties, ignoring human rights considerations, and violating international law in the name of protecting civil liberties, human rights and international law.  In short, Bush and friends argued that in order to ensure American freedom, it was necessary to smother it with a pillow.   

The trend of sovereign doublethink reached its apex last fall, however, as the threat of economic collapse and the Great Depression II menaced the imagination, and decision making logic, of the Bush administration.  In a singular moment of head-scratching rhetoric, even by the former president's impressive standards, Bush announced that his administration would seek to preserve capitalism by doing away with it altogether.  "I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system," Bush told CNN to the general confusion of those still bothering to listen to whatever came out of his mouth. 

Sovereign doublethink, however, is far from being the exclusive preserve of the United States. Look no further than our neighbors to the south in Central America, and we see its malign presence at work there as well.  The Honduran coup-a golpe profilacto in local parlance-which ejected that country's democratically elected president Mel Zelaya from power was justified through the logic of sovereign doublethink.  In order to save Honduran democracy, the golpistas (and their conservative allies in the US Congress) argued, it was necessary to commit patently undemocratic actions.  The rest would magically work itself out.       

And now here we are again, being told by the president of the United States that the best way to get out of Afghanistan is to double-down and go in further.  The president's speech was rife with sovereign doublethink, the most startling example being the president's assurance that while Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul is surely corrupt, the answer for curing this cancer is to give it more money. And on the ground, sovereign doublethink is already put into practice by the White House's attempt to gain control of the anarchic "Af-Pak" border areas by sending in lawless Blackwater bad boys to commit all manner of war crimes.

None of which is to suggest that I believe the Obama administration is scheming Oceanic Party nefariousness, or even following the depressingly cynical foreign policy established by the Bush administration.  No, I fear that Obama's speech may indicate something more worrisome still.  At the most critical juncture facing the United States in this young century, and after having promised to smash the state of exception policy agenda engendered by the Global War on Terror, the president exhibits symptoms of having fallen under sovereign doublethink's enchanting spell, a spell that obscures good judgment with false promises of self-assurance.  As Orwell reminds us, doublethink endows the individual with "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies." 

Yale's David Bromwich aptly summed up the president's performance last night by concluding that "Obama is the most convincing person he knows. He can convince himself of a proposition, "A," and a second proposition, "Not A," and come to believe that the two may be combined. At West Point, he seemed to want to declare a policy and take it back in a single breath. But there are circles that can't be squared; and it is with war as with other fatal commitments: the way in is not the way out."