The “Nostos” of the Commander in Chief

For days, media around the world have tried every way to determine the actual numbers Barack Obama gave in his speech about Afghanistan, to calculate the complex arithmetic of the surge: How many soldiers will come back from the theater of war and how quickly? However, as often happens during election campaigns (because in just over a year the U.S. will be voting) at times the “frame” is even more important than the picture the president paints, which plans for the return of 33 thousand men: 10 thousand by the end of the year and the rest by September 2012, just in time for the presidential election.

The commander in chief delivered adorned rhetoric; he built his speech as a real “nostos,” a homecoming, running from the Twin Towers and Pearl Harbor out to Afghanistan and the Abbottabad compound in Pakistan, then returning to America, to Chicago (which will be hosting a NATO summit next May) and Fort Campbell, where the president congratulated the Seals’ work on the bin Laden mission.

Obama emphasized this circular pattern in the key phrase, almost an exhortation: “America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home.” This proposes an Anabasis rather than an Odyssey to such an extent that the speech’s lukewarm reception by the American media can be read as a clash of conflicting narratives. On one hand, the White House claims the success of bin Laden’s murder and the substantial conclusion of the September 11 events that began a decade ago (“[W]e are fulfilling that commitment,” as Obama said in the most delicate phrase of the whole speech.)

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On the other hand, the American public heard something similar to “mission accomplished” in the president’s words (like Bush’s unfortunate banner on the USS Lincoln). Making some calculations, the people fear that this new turn contradicts the administration’s previous strategy led by the generals and would thus relegate the Afghan file to the archive of American failures, on the same shelf as Iraq and Vietnam.

However, since the president delivered his speech during prime time, directly into American homes, the image suggested even more than Obama’s voice did. First, there was the choice of location. It was not the Oval Office, which in White House history has served as the Holy of Holies for solemn pronouncements, particularly about war (for example, that of John Fitzgerald Kennedy about the Cuban missile crisis). Neither was the speech delivered from a military academy, where the most ambitious strategies and plans can be explained among soldiers and stars.

No, according to the president’s spin doctors, the homecoming message wasn’t to be swept away by the winds of war: Everything had to suggest a new phase.

In the visual wake of the announcement of the mission that led to Osama’s death, this more recent speech took place in the same location, the East Room, with its red carpeted entrance, the flight of white columns, the gold damask chairs, the crystal chandelier, the lit podium, the flags. The room made a more spacious set than the Oval Office but was still prepared by the Obama boys according to the strict rules that apply to the president’s office: only one print journalist in the pool and only one photographer.

This was, indeed, a concession, because photos were only taken after the speech, in a kind of fiction that Obama allowed to enable the photographer to have pictures from the speech. After the announcement about bin Laden, the media had complained about only having had access during the speech at the end.

The visual narrative of the discourse on Afghanistan was, therefore, fully continuous with the narrative of Osama. This speech was the next step, used to subliminally, even iconically, evoke the administration’s greatest achievement. Upon seeing the president alone, without generals or advisors, you thought of the Navy Seals’ blitz.

Obama’s speech was captured in an continuous 20-second shot, followed by nearly a quarter of an hour of half-length filming, the president’s gesturing reduced to small movements of the hands and his eyes on the teleprompter.

Others will be there to do the math. But the revered image of the commander in chief suggested only one thing: I am the one who killed Osama; now I will carry you home. And maybe in a year or so I’ll come back home too. Perhaps a to a white one. Mission accomplished?