The Useful Enemy

President Barack Obama had better be careful with his attempts to bring down Al-Qaeda, solve the Afghanistan War by engaging with the Taliban, improve relations with adversaries Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, and have more cooperative relationships with other nations. He may be left without a "useful enemy" against which he can rally his country around him. After all, that is what his predecessor, George W. Bush, was a master at. But, perhaps our new president has his own ideas about who (or what) our enemies should be.

I believe that Barack Obama is a true idealist (as opposed to W., a cynic) in that he sees the challenges ahead as not fighting enemies, but solving problems. He sees this country's abandonment of its manufacturing base, the diminishing and politicizing of our science, our overdependence on foreign sources of energy, the state of health care and its debilitating effect, both economically and psychologically, on the people, and the growing threats to our environment. And of course, terrorism. He believes that the U.S. should reach out and engage in cooperative efforts with other nations to tackle these challenges.

Still, President Obama may find that fighting concepts may not carry the same political clout as fighting tangible, named targets. I wonder whether, in a year or two, we'll have a new set of "enemies" to get all worked up over.

In this vein, I also wonder who in Obama's staff will emerge to shape and manipulate this concept of who and what our adversaries are. You can be assured of one thing: we will always have our enemies, if for no other reason than that our leaders need them for us to feel that we need our leaders to protect us from them.