What was that about the pen and the sword?

Eight years of the Bush administration’s singular approach to international diplomacy has all but convinced the world that words mean nothing. A doctrine of limited and non-engagement, rigid insistence on pre-conditions and an instinctive distrust of spoken or written emollience in any form has been assiduously implemented since 2001, continuously justified by the same anti-intellectual propaganda which defended the banning of essential stem-cell research and disputed the reality of human-influence climate change.

But it was wrong. Words do mean something. And words do bring results – what the Bush years constantly promised but failed to deliver.

President Obama’s first post-inauguration interview with Al Arabiya was squarely aimed at the Muslim world and roundly dismissed the belligerent tone which we all had come to think was the way things had to be. The Bush doctrine avoided ambiguity, subtlety and tact, determined to further a limited world view based on ‘results’, ‘action’ and ‘power’. To hear a President using conciliatory language should not be amazing. But it is, as it hasn’t happened for so long. And that language is what people hear. And what people hear influences what they think. And in a global struggle to define what is right, to support ideals of freedom, choice, peace and security, it matters what people think.

Barack Obama was portrayed by Conservative America as an elegant wordsmith – the thinly disguised insinuation being that folks don’t ought to trust ‘fancy words’, that ‘smart talking’ isn’t the same as genuine integrity. That, ultimately, language should be feared, not respected: a source of subjugation, not inspiration. What kind of people activity stoke the insecurities of the marginalised and misinformed to further their own end? I can think of a few groups who have done just that, and they don’t make pleasant company.

We now see that things are different. Guantanamo Bay will close in a year. Finally. Iran’s president is being upstaged by a new, calmer, more reflective ‘Great Satan’. Finally. Science is once again recognised as the force that extended life expectancy in the western world into the eighties. Finally.

And maybe a man who is able to use words with skill and elegance can in his interviews encapsulate the conflicting interests of the Palestinians and Israelis, or the UN soldiers and Afghan poppy growers. And if those people hear these words, maybe they will begin to think differently, and just about believe that the West is able to comprehend the problems they face.

Words could turn out to be the weapons of mass destruction George W. Bush never found.