There’s a tragedy to John Brennan’s reluctance to come clean about whatever it is he did in the Bush administration with regard to domestic surveillance. That’s because a good half of the speech he gave today was perhaps the most elegant articulation of a progressive approach to combating terrorism that I can remember hearing. Here’s my wrap for the Washington Independent, which Holly Yeager and I headlined "Obama Aide Declares End To War On Terror," because Brennan did: 

Above all, Brennan emphasized that the U.S. was not locked in a struggle with the world’s billion Muslims. He derided al-Qaeda’s self-presentation as a “highly organized, global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate,” and said that the administration would abandon the use of the word “jihad” in reference to al-Qaeda, since the term carries “religious legitimacy” in the Muslim world that al-Qaeda’s “murderers… desperately seek but in no way deserve.” David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert and former adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, has recently argued in an influential book that the U.S. has insufficiently distinguished between implacable enemies and those who fight out of opportunism, desperation or other, non-eschatological reasons.

Brennan used that insight to explain the basis for the Obama administration’s approach to global governance, stability and development assistance. “Any comprehensive approach has to also address the upstream factors — the conditions that help fuel violent extremism,” Brennan said. Military, intelligence or law-enforcement actions are unable to confront those conditions, which he said include the “basic needs and legitimate grievances of ordinary people” for prosperity, education, “dignity and worth,” and security. “If we fail to confront the broader political, economic, and social conditions in which extremists thrive, then there will always be another recruit in the pipeline, another attack coming downstream,” Brennan said.

"Dignity and worth" as root-cause contributors to violent extremism! This would have been considered way too left-wing for mainstream discussion as recently as 2004. And the man saying them is now the president’s assistant for counterterrorism and homeland security. He can walk into the Oval Office without an appointment. And he adjudicates counterterrorism-related disputes. Brennan could have done all the bad stuff everyone suspects him of doing and this would still be remarkable. Come to think of it, it’s all the more remarkable that he said all this stuff if indeed he was involved in all this bad stuff.

And because Adam mentioned it first, I have to say I was reminded of this quote that Samantha Power gave me way back in the heady late winter/early spring of 2008:

"Look at why the baddies win these elections," Power says. "It’s because [populations are] living in climates of fear." U.S. policy, she continues, should be "about meeting people where they’re at. Their fears of going hungry, or of the thug on the street. That’s the swamp that needs draining. If we’re to compete with extremism, we have to be able to provide these things that we’re not [providing].

This really was a red-letter day for the Obama Doctrine.