SOMETIMES a heckler can be a politician’s best friend. Giving his fullest account of counter-terrorism policy for some years in an hour-long speech to the National Defense University on May 23rd, President Barack Obama was repeatedly and loudly interrupted by a woman protester demanding the immediate closure of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp and greater respect for the rule of law. The heckling helped Mr Obama, whose speech had until then felt like an address to a straw man—some imaginary citizen of tender conscience who needed to be assured that America was right to target terrorists with lethal drone strikes in Pakistan or Yemen, and needed reminding that it was not that easy to close Guantánamo or put terror suspects on trial in mainland American courts. True, left-wing supporters of the president are upset with his use of armed drones, and hate the idea that American guards and doctors are force-feeding more than 100 detainees on hunger strike in Guantánamo. But most ordinary Americans tell pollsters that they thoroughly approve of killing suspected terrorists with remote strikes in the badlands of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. The most potent political challenges to the president’s conduct of the war on terror have to date come from the Right. Republicans delight in portraying Mr Obama and his government as being soft on Islamic extremists, most recently denouncing his attorney-general, Eric Holder, for allowing the surviving Boston bombing suspect to be read his civilian legal rights. In the view of several conservatives in Congress, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should have been thrown into the legal limbo of Guantánamo and interrogated, without any nonsense about lawyers and a right to remain silent.

Mr Obama took office in 2008 vowing to close Guantánamo's prison camp swiftly, transferring many detainees back to their home countries and putting others, including high-profile suspected al-Qaeda leaders, on trial in federal courts on the mainland, rather than at military tribunals in the international limbo of an American naval base on Cuba.

The president signed an order to that effect in 2009 but the effort was starved of funding by Republicans in Congress, joined by scores of Democrats, fearful of being seen as soft on security. Congress finally passed a law banning any transfer of detainees to America, even for trial.

In his speech today, Mr Obama acknowledged that Guantánamo remained a knotty problem, as it held detainees “known” to have taken part in terror attacks but who could not be prosecuted in civilian courts for lack of admissible evidence. With more solemnity than substance, the president once again called on Congress to lift restrictions on detainee transfers from “Gitmo” (as he called the camp, using a military abbreviation), and pledged to seek a location in America to hold military commissions. At the same time the president said he would lift his own moratorium on sending detainees to Yemen.

The president stopped several times to allow the lone heckler, from the anti-war movement Code Pink, to berate him over his policies, and suggested that the situation at Guantánamo Bay was unsustainable and un-American. “Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike. Is that who we are? Is that something that our founders foresaw?” he asked.

The meatiest part of the speech covered instruments of war and remote-controlled force that are fully in the president’s power, starting with the armed drones strikes with which Mr Obama has killed dozens of terror suspects. Those killed include four American citizens, a death toll only fully revealed on the eve of the president’s speech.

His defence of such strikes was not really aimed at the American public. It was aimed at the curious coalition of critics who charge him with killing terrorists who would more properly be captured alive: a coalition made up of left-wing Democrats, foreign politicians and right-wing Republicans bent on finding ways to attack a president who they despise.

The president defended drone strikes as more precise than conventional attacks from the air, and less dangerous than operations involving American “boots on the ground”. The raid by special forces in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden “cannot be the norm”, he said. The risks had been immense, with a healthy dose of luck helping to prevent civilian casualties or an extended firefight.

Though strikes by distant drones were legal and had saved lives, Mr Obama announced that he had signed a new framework of guidelines, oversight and accountability governing the use of force against terrorism. Describing the deaths of civilian bystanders in drone strikes as “heartbreaking tragedies”, the president pledged that drone strikes would only be used when the capture of terror suspects was impossible, when terrorists posed a “continuing and imminent threat to the American people”, when no other government was capable of effectively addressing that threat and when there was a “near-certainty” that no civilians would be killed or injured.

In a reminder that the majority of the American public takes an essentially parochial view of drones, Mr Obama also found time to address the paranoid concern raised by such Republican senators as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz that the government might send armed drones to prowl the skies over America, to take out Americans suspected of terrorism without a trial. For the record, Mr Obama said, he did not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any American citizen—whether with a drone or a shotgun—without due process. Nor should any president deploy armed drones over American soil, he added.

But he defended the killing of Anwar Awlaki, accusing him of plotting to blow up airplanes, and saying that when an American goes abroad to wage war against America and cannot be captured before carrying out a plot, his citizenship should no more shield him than a sniper shooting on a crowd should be protected from police marksmen.

The president’s tone was more pedagogical than bombastic. He sounded like the man that he has become: a former constitutional law professor of liberal instincts, turned commander-in-chief of a superpower that aspires to global respect, but must keep vigil against those who hate it with murderous intensity.

After more than a decade of intense war-fighting, he described a world of more diffuse, local threats from affiliates of al-Qaeda, extremists in loose regional networks or radicalised individuals, including American citizens or legal residents already in the country. The scale of the threat resembled the dangers that faced America before the September 11th 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, DC, he said.

The real message of the president’s address is that the global war on terror begun on a sunny day in September 2001, in the horror of sudden attack, must and will end. He explicitly acknowledged a legal and political headache that privately alarms his closest advisers—the threadbare legal authority underpinning the war on terror, that dates back to a few phrases of war-making authority passed by Congress just days after September 11th.

That war-making authority needed to be refined, and ultimately repealed, the president said, suggesting that the fight against terrorism had to become less an armed conflict, and more an ongoing effort to dismantle terrorist groups. He vowed not to sign any law expanding the 2001 mandate further. “This war like all wars must end,” Mr Obama said. “That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

(Photo credit: AFP)