DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Bush's war of the words
By Tom Engelhardt
For Homer, those epithets attached to his heroes and gods were undoubtedly
mnemonic devices - the fleet-footed Achilles, Poseidon the Earth-shaker, the
wily Odysseus, the ox-eyed Hera. But isn't it strange how many similar, if
somewhat less heroic, catch words and phrases have adhered to key officials of
the Bush administration these last years? Here's my own partial list:
President George ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job") Bush, Vice President
Dick ("last throes") Cheney, Secretary of Defense
Donald ("stuff happens") Rumsfeld, then-national security adviser, now
Secretary of State Condoleezza ("mushroom cloud") Rice, Central Intelligence
Agency director George ("slam dunk") Tenet, then-deputy secretary of defense
Paul ("[Iraq] floats on a sea of oil") Wolfowitz, Centcom Commander General
Tommy ("We don't do body counts") Franks, then-White House counsel,
now-Attorney General Alberto ("quaint") Gonzales, withdrawn Supreme Court
nominee and White House counsel Harriet ("You are the best governor ever")
Miers, and most recently House Speaker Dennis ("The buck stops here") Hastert.
You know a person by the company he or she keeps - so the saying goes. You
could also say that you know an administration by the linguistic company it
keeps; and though George W Bush is usually presented as an inarticulate
stumbler of a speech and news-conference giver, it's nothing short of
remarkable how many new words and phrases (or redefined old ones) this
president and his administration have managed to lodge in our lives and our
heads.
Since September 11, 2001, the United States has been not so much the planet's
lone "hyperpower" as its gunslinger in that great western ("dead or alive")
tradition that George and Dick learned about in the movies of their childhood.
But as fast as they've reached for their guns (and may do so again in relation
to Iran after the mid-term elections), over the past years they've reached for
one thing faster: their dictionaries.
And of all the words that came to their minds post-September 11, the first and
fastest was an old one - "war". Within hours of the September 11 attacks, it
was already on the scene and being redefined by administration officials and
supporters. The US would not, for instance, actually declare war. After all,
whom was war to be declared on? We were simply "at war", and that was that.
Since then, according to George Bush and his associates, the US has either been
fighting "the global war on terror" (aka GWOT), "the long war", "the millennium
war", "World War III", or "World War IV". We Americans not only entered an
immediate state of war, but one meant to last generations, and with it we got a
commander-in-chief presidency secretly redefined in such a way as to place it
outside any legal boundaries.
We were, then, at war. But the first war we were "at" was a war of the words,
and at its heart from the beginning was the status of the people we were
capturing on or near various battlefields, or even kidnapping off the streets
of European cities, and exactly what we could do to them. If John F Kennedy is
remembered for saying, "Ich bin ein Berliner," perhaps when history
shrinks George W Bush to a soundbite, it will be, "We abide by the law of the
United States; we do not torture." To say those words - repeatedly - he has had
to mount not a soapbox, nor even the TV or radio version of a bully pulpit, but
a pile of torn, trampled dictionaries.
If you don't believe me, go back and read, for instance, the infamous "torture
memo" of 2002 in which the top legal minds of the Justice Department and the
White House counsel's office labored over how to define "severe" and "pain" in
such a way that almost no inflicted pain in a prisoner's interrogation would
ever prove too "severe". Whole sections of that document sound as if they were
cobbled together by a learned panel for a new edition of some devil's
dictionary. ("The word 'profound' has a number of meanings, all of which convey
a significant depth. Webster's New International Dictionary 1977 [2nd ed
1935] defines profound as ...").
In the end, these experts defined "torture" to suit administration needs in the
following pretzeled fashion: "Must be equivalent in intensity to the pain
accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of
bodily function, or even death." And though, under pressure, the "torture memo"
was finally disavowed, Bush has been able to claim that "we do not torture"
only by adhering to its ludicrous definitions. (Even then, his administration's
interrogators have tortured prisoners.) This was in fact a typical Bush-era
document of shame, symbolic of the bureaucratic lawlessness let loose at the
heart of the US government by officials intent on creating a pseudo-legal basis
for replacing the rule of law with the rule of a Commander-in-Chief.
Never has a US administration rolled up its sleeves and redefined terms more
systematically or unnervingly with less attention to reality.
When a dynasty fell in ancient China, it was believed that part of the
explanation for its demise lay in the increasing gap between words and reality.
The emperor of whatever new dynasty had taken power would then perform a
ceremony called "the rectification of names" to bring language and what it was
meant to describe back into sync. We Americans need to lose the emperor part of
the equation, but adopt such a ceremony. Never have our realities and our words
for them been quite so out of whack.
Between August 2005 when, armed with two cheap tape recorders and a scribbled
list of questions, I first met historian and activist Howard Zinn in a coffee
shop and last summer, I had a chance to hang out with 11 iconoclastic thinkers
and activists, all of whom were concerned with how to describe the realities of
our imperial world as well as with the fate of our country. Recently, these
interviews were gathered into a book, Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch
Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. What follows are
apt quotes from each of the interviewees - and my own brief discussions of
Bush-redefined words. Think of it as a kind of call-and-response essay as well
as my own modest bow to 11 engaged souls whom I admire.
Howard Zinn (Academic and social critic): "I came to the conclusion that,
given the technology of modern warfare, war is inevitably a war against
children, against civilians. When you look at the ratio of civilian to military
dead, it changes from 50-50 in World War II to 80-20 in Vietnam, maybe as high
as 90-10 today ... When you face that fact, war is now always a war against
civilians, and so against children. No political goal can justify it, and so
the great challenge before the human race in our time is to solve the problems
of tyranny and aggression, and do it without war."
Collateral damage: It's been all collateral damage all the time from
official Pentagon lips since George W Bush launched America's Afghan war just
weeks after September 11, 2001, and followed it quickly with an invasion of
Iraq. Wedding parties wiped out; children killed by accident; civilians
murdered at places like Haditha and Ishaqi; scores of Iraqi civilians dead in
the first air strikes on Baghdad (and not a single Iraqi leader killed);
thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians swept up in US raids and tossed into Abu
Ghraib prison for endless months without charges; "terrorist safe houses" hit
from the air in crowded urban neighborhoods where nearby residents simply died.
Since March 2003, more than 2,700 American soldiers, more than 200 troops from
allied forces, and several hundred private contractors or mercenaries have died
in Iraq. (Another 340 Americans have died in Afghanistan.) We have no idea how
many Iraqi soldiers, insurgents and militia members have died in that same
period along with many tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, all "collateral
damage". But we do know one thing. In modern wars, especially those conducted
in part from the air (as both the Iraq and Afghan ones have been), there's
nothing "collateral" about civilian deaths. If anything, the "collateral
deaths" are those of the combatants on any side. Civilian deaths are now the
central fact, the very essence of modern imperial warfare. Not seeing that
means not seeing war.
James Carroll (Boston Globe writer): "The good things of the Roman Empire
are what we remember about it - the roads, the language, the laws, the
buildings, the classics ... But we pay very little attention to what the Roman
Empire was to the people at its bottom - the slaves who built those roads ...
the oppressed and occupied peoples who were brought into the empire if they
submitted, but radically and completely smashed if they resisted at all ... We
Americans are full of our sense of ourselves as having benign imperial
impulses. That's why the idea of the American Empire was celebrated as a benign
phenomenon. We were going to bring order to the world. Well, yes ... as long as
you didn't resist us. And that's where we really have something terrible in
common with the Roman Empire ... We must reckon with imperial power as it is
felt by people at the bottom. Rome's power. America's."
The New Rome: In neo-con Washington, there was an early burst of pride
in empire. The US wasn't just, as in the 1990s, the planet's "global sheriff",
it was now the mightiest power in history, an imperial Goliath that put the old
British Empire and possibly even the Roman one in the shade.
Right-wing pundit Charles Krauthammer wrote in Time magazine even before the
attacks of September 11: "America is no mere international citizen. It is the
dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly,
America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations, and create new
realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will."
Between the first of those "implacable demonstrations of will" in the fall of
2001 and Bush's "Mission Accomplished" moment in May 2003, many other pundits
weighed in, embracing the idea of empire in a way that had once been taboo in
this country. Fareed Zacaria of Newsweek was typical in speaking of "'a
comprehensive unipolarity' that nobody has seen since Rome dominated the
world". Max Boot in USA Today wrote a piece headlined "American imperialism? No
need to run away from label" ("On the whole, US imperialism has been the
greatest force for good in the world during the past century"). For the liberal
and squeamish, there was Michael Ignatieff in the New York Times Magazine
urging us not to "embrace" imperialism, but merely to do our duty and pick up
"the burden" of Empire Lite.
Five years later, with the sack of Rome looking more applicable to our world
than a Pax Romana, perhaps another old word should be making its
reappearance: "tyranny" ("A government in which a single ruler is invested with
absolute power"). Outside the United States, the Bush administration has
already set itself up as a tyranny, with its private network of prisons, its
secret airlines for kidnapping anyone it chooses, and its power to wage war on
the say-so of no one but itself, anywhere it cares to. Domestically, the
picture is still mixed, but the danger signals are obvious.
Juan Cole (academic): "[Iraq] is one of the great foreign-policy debacles
of American history. There's an enormous amount at stake in the oil Gulf and
Bush is throwing grenades around in the cockpit of the world economy. So I
think he has dug his own grave with regard to Iraq policy."
Regime change, shock and awe, decapitation, cakewalk: Ah, Iraq. What a
field of linguistic fantasy play for Bush administration officials. "Regime
change" was the global order of the day, if that "axis of evil" (and perhaps 60
other nations rumored to harbor terrorists) didn't attend to us. "Shock and
awe" was what we would bring to Iraq, thereby humbling the whole "axis of evil"
in a single awesome rain of destruction from the skies. As the planet's most
dazzling military power, we would then go on a "cakewalk" (a high-strutting
dance) to Baghdad and beyond, reorganizing the whole Middle East to our taste.
"Decapitation" would be what would happen to Saddam Hussein's regime.
Behind such words lay inside-the-Beltway dreams of absolute global domination,
of imposing a planetary Pax Americana by force of arms. It was the sort
of scheme that once would have been the property of some "evil empire" we stood
against. Behind it all, for an administration deeply linked to the energy
business, lay control over the oil heartlands of the planet, known to this
administration as "the arc of instability". Oil, or what George Bush referred
to before launching his invasion as "Iraq's patrimony", was of such interest
that the only places US troops guarded in those first "postwar" days of looting
were oilfields and the Oil Ministry building in Baghdad.
Of course, what Bush and his friends succeeded in visiting on the region was
ever-spreading chaos. Since 2001, in its own version of the rectification of
names, the Bush administration has actually been creating a genuine "arc of
instability" stretching from Central Asia to Lebanon. The grenades are indeed
now in the cockpit.
Cindy Sheehan (anti-war activist): "[Hurricane] Katrina was a natural
disaster that nobody could help, but the man-made disaster afterwards was just
horrible. I mean, number one, all our resources are in Iraq. Number two, what
little resources we did have were deployed far too late. George Bush was
golfing and eating birthday cake with John McCain while people were hanging off
their houses praying to be rescued. He's so disconnected from this country -
and from reality. I heard a line yesterday that I thought was perfect. This man
said he thinks Katrina will be Bush's Monica."
Homeland: It may be an ugly word, with overtones of Nazi Germany (and
perhaps the World War II-era Soviet Union as well), but now it's ours, a truly
un-American replacement for "nation" or "country". Like a number of Bush-era
terms, it was lurking in the shadows before September 11. Now, we have a
homeland as well as "homeland security", and even a Department of Homeland
Security, a giant and, as Katrina demonstrated, remarkably ineffective new
bureaucracy. By its very name, the "Defense" Department should, of course, be
America's Department of Homeland Security. But its focus now is on dominating
the rest of the planet (and space), so instead we have two Defense Departments,
both quagmires of civilian bureaucratic ineptitude, both lucrative as anything,
neither going anywhere soon. If this isn't an attempt not just to redefine US
reality, but to bankrupt it, I can't imagine what is. George Bush has been our
Katrina.
Chalmers Johnson (author and academic): "Part of
empire is the way it's penetrated our society, the
way we've become dependent on it ... The military
budget is starting to bankrupt the country. It's
got so much in it that's well beyond any rational
military purpose. It equals just less than half of
total global military spending. And yet here we
are, stymied by two of the smallest, poorest
countries on Earth. Iraq before we invaded had a
GDP the size of the state of Louisiana, and
Afghanistan was certainly one of the poorest
places on the planet. And yet these two places
have stopped us."
Footprint, enduring camp, lily pad: Call this a sampler of the
euphemistic language that goes with garrisoning the planet. In the Bush years,
the Pentagon has not only grown ever more gargantuan, but has come to occupy
the heartlands of foreign (and increasingly domestic) policy. It has in essence
displaced the State Department from diplomacy and is now in the process of
displacing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from covert intelligence
operations. In these years, Pentagon strategists, discussing America's 700+
military bases around the world, began speaking of our military "footprint" on
the planet - in the singular. As an imperial colossus, it seems, only one
military boot at a time could even fit on the planet.
By the time US troops entered Baghdad in April 2003, the Pentagon already had
plans on the drawing boards for four massive permanent military bases in Iraq,
but the phrase "permanent base" was not to be used. For a while, these were
referred to, charmingly enough, as "enduring camps" (like so many summer
establishments for children who had overstayed their leave). In the same way,
the strategic-basing posture of this era, meant to bring deployable US troops
ever closer to locking down that "arc of instability", involved "lily pad"
bases - the thought being that, if the occasion arose, American "frogs", armed
to the teeth with pre-positioned munitions, would be able to hop agilely from
one prepositioned "pad" to another, knocking off the "flies" as they went. This
is part of the strange, defanged language with which US leaders meant to create
a Pax Americana planet.
Ann Wright (former State Department official): "Thirty-five years in the
government between my military service and the State Department, under seven
administrations. It was hard. I liked representing America. I kept hoping the
administration would go back to the Security Council for its authorization to
go to war ... I was hoping against hope that our government would not go into
what really is an illegal war of aggression that meets no criteria of
international law. When it was finally evident we were going to do so, I said
to myself: It ain't going to be on my watch."
Service: And what about missing words? "Service to country", such an
honorable concept, was swept with "sacrifice" into Bush's dustbin of history.
In response to September 11, Bush famously told Americans to sacrifice for his
coming wars by leading normal lives, going shopping as usual, and visiting
Disney World. The only ones capable of truly "serving" their country, as this
president seems to see it, are CIA kidnappers, illegal eavesdroppers of the
National Security Agency, and the interrogators who perform the tough acts of
torture that have been redefined by administration lawyers as something else
entirely. And yet, in these years, the ideal of service has not died. Retired
colonel and State Department official Ann Wright - at present, an anti-war
activist - was one of three diplomats who resigned to protest the onrushing
invasion of Iraq in 2003. They have since been joined by a veritable fallen
legion of government employees, who were honorable or steadfast enough in their
duties or actually believed too fully in the US constitution, and so found
themselves forced to resign in protest, quit, or simply be pushed off the cliff
by cronies of the Bush administration.
Someone needs to redefine the "checks and balances" of the US system. The only
operative check-and-balance for most of the past five years has been one the
Founding Fathers never dreamed of (because they couldn't imagine a government
structure like ours), and that's been the angry, leaking, protesting members of
the federal government, the intelligence community, the military, and the
bureaucracy. (On the other side of that equation, no one has yet come fully to
grips with, or reported decently on, the depth of the Bush purge of the
government, the replacement of officials down to the lowest levels with
administration pals, cronies and ideologues.)
Mark Danner (New York Times writer): "When you look at the record, the
phrase I come back to, not only about interrogation but the many other steps
that constitute the Bush state of exception, state of emergency, since
[September 11] is 'take the gloves off'."
Extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, torture: Donald Rumsfeld's
"office" was calling for interrogators to take off those "gloves" in the case
of the "American Taliban", John Walker Lindh, soon after he was captured in
late 2001. It became a commonplace phrase inside the government (and even among
the military in Iraq). Given the image, you wonder what exactly was under those
gloves. Off in Langley, Virginia, according to Ron Suskind in his new book The
One Percent Doctrine, CIA director George Tenet was using a far blunter
image. He was talking about "taking off the shackles" (that supposedly had been
put on the agency in the Vietnam/Watergate era).
Rendition - as in "render unto Caesar" - gained that "extraordinary" quickly
indeed as the CIA began kidnapping terror "suspects" around the world and no
longer rendering them to the US court system (as in the years of president Bill
Clinton) but to various Third World allies willing to torture them or to
"secret prisons" - a phrase that, in the previous century, would have been
reserved for the Gestapo or Josef Stalin's NKVD.
In the meantime, administration lawyers began redefining "torture", a word not
normally considered terribly difficult to grasp, more or less out of existence.
By the time they were done, mock drownings, an interrogation "technique" called
(as if it were surfing) "waterboarding", ceased for a while to be what even
medieval Europe knew it to be: "the water torture". In no other single area did
Bush administration officials (and their legal camp followers) reach more
quickly for their dictionaries to pretzel and torture the language. This
represented a very specific kind of reach for power. After all, if you could
kidnap or capture a man anywhere on Earth, transport him to a secret prison (or
at least, as with Guantanamo Bay, one beyond the purview of any court), and
then torture him, and if it could all be redefined as within the bounds of
legality and propriety, then you had captured a previously unknown kind of
power for the presidency that was as un-American as the word "homeland". Think
of it this way: those who can torture openly can do anything.
Mike Davis (scholar): "It's clear that the future of guerrilla warfare,
insurrection against the world system, has moved into the city. Nobody has
realized this with as much clarity as the Pentagon ... Its strategists are way
ahead of geopoliticians and traditional foreign-relations types in
understanding the significance of a world of slums ... There's really quite an
extraordinary military literature trying to address what the Pentagon sees as
the most novel terrain of this century, which it now models in the slums of
Karachi, Port-au-Prince, and Baghdad."
Preventive war: From the militarized heavens to the slum cities of the
Third World, the Pentagon is doing all the research and development. It already
has its advanced weaponry for 2020, 2030, 2040 on the drawing boards. It's
planning for and dreaming about the future in a way inconceivable for any other
part of the government. It not only has a space command but, for the first
time, a separate command for our own continent (US Northcom) that is preparing
for future hurricanes, future pandemics, future domestic disasters of every
sort, now that our civil government, growing ever larger, handles things ever
less well.
The Bush administration has elevated not just the Pentagon, but the principle
of, and a belief in the efficacy of, force to the level of an idol to be
worshiped. In 2002, Bush suggested a new term - preventive war - which was then
embedded in the National Security Strategy of the United States, a key planning
document. At the time, Condoleezza Rice put the thinking behind the term this
way: "As a matter of common sense, the United States must be prepared to take
action, when necessary, before threats have fully materialized."
This was, in fact, a recipe for waging war any time an administration cared to.
No longer would the United States wait until the eve of an attack to strike
"preemptively". Now, if it even occurred to the president or vice president
that there was a "one percent" chance some country might someday, somehow
endanger us, we were free to launch our forces; and "preventive" sounded so
much better than the previous term, "war of aggression". For the Bush
administration, and so for Americans, a war of aggression had preemptively been
moved into the same category with preventive medicine.
Katrina vanden Heuvel (Editor, The Nation): Sometimes, though,
frustration lies in the feeling that you just can't convey the enormity of,
say, the Bush administration's unitary executive theory. How do you convey that
no previous administration I know of has so openly, so brazenly, on so many
fronts tried to subvert the constitution that what we're living through is a
crisis that may bode the death knell of our democracy? Why aren't people
jumping up and down?"
Unitary executive theory: This isn't a theory, but a long-planned grab
for tyrannical control under the presidents's "commander-in-chief" powers in a
carefully redefined "wartime" situation that will not stop being so in our
lifetimes. This "theory" was meant to give a gloss of constitutional legality
to any conceivable presidential act. What the "unitary" meant was "no room for
you" when it came to Congress and the courts. The "executive" was, as former
secretary of state Colin Powell's chief of staff Larry Wilkinson put it, rule
by a "cabal", a cult of true believers inside the presidential bubble,
impermeable to outside opinion or pressure. They were eager - when it came to
torture, unlimited forms of surveillance, and the ability to define reality -
to invest individuals secretly with something like the powers of gods.
Andrew Bacevich (academic): "We are in deep, deep trouble. An important
manifestation of that trouble is this shortsighted infatuation with military
power ... There's such an unwillingness to confront the dilemmas we face as a
people that I find deeply troubling. I know we're a democracy. We have
elections. But it's become a procedural democracy. Our politics are not really
meaningful. In a meaningful politics, you and I could argue about important
differences, and out of that argument might come not resolution or
reconciliation, but at least an awareness of the consequences of going your way
as opposed to mine. We don't even have that argument. That's what's so
dismaying."
Democracy: Since September 11, 2001, George W Bush and his top officials
have aggressively advanced into the world under the banner of spreading not
stability, but democracy (at cruise-missile point). But they defined the
freedom to vote (as the recent Palestinian elections showed) only as the
freedom to vote as they wished the vote to go - and it generally didn't.
Meanwhile, at home, the Republican Party was practicing an advanced form of
gerrymandering, election financing, smear advertising, and voter-suppression
tactics that made a mockery of the electoral process. Everyone was to vote
gloriously, but matters were to be prepared - geographically, financially, and
in terms of public opinion - so that the vote would be nothing but a
confirmation of what already was. What, after all, do you call it when, in what
is considered the most wide-open election for the House of Representatives in
more than a decade, only perhaps 40-50 of 435 seats are actually competitive
(and that's considered extraordinary)? Since 1998, 98% of House incumbents have
won re-election, while in the last "open" election in 1994, when a Republican
"revolution" took the House in what the New York Times calls "a seismic
realignment", 91% of incumbents were nonetheless re-elected.
Barbara Ehrenreich (social critic, journalist, author): "Today, we have
this even larger federal government, more and more of it being war-related,
surveillance-related. I mean it's gone beyond our wildest Clinton
administration dreams. I think progressives can't just be seen as
pro-big-government when big government has gotten so nasty. Katrina's a perfect
example of how militarized the government has gotten even when it's supposedly
trying to help people. The initial response of the government was a military
one. When they finally got people down there, it was armed guards to protect
the fancy stores and keep people in that convention center - at gunpoint."
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job!": And it has been a heck of a
job! In both the United States and Iraq, government has become ever less
effective and meaningful; the plunderers have been let loose to "reconstruct"
each country; the deepest fears have been released and deep divisions
exacerbated.
We all know what a failed state is - one of those marginal lands where anarchy
is the rule and government not the norm. To offer but two examples: Afghanistan
is a failed state, a narco-warlord-insurrectionary land where the government
barely controls the capital, Kabul; Iraq is now a failed state, a
civil-war-torn, insurrectionary land where the government does not even control
the capital, Baghdad. But here's a term that isn't in our language: "failed
empire". It might be worth using in any ceremonies meant to bring words and
reality closer together.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of
Tomdispatch and the author of The
End of Victory Culture. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback. Most recently, he is the author of
Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch
Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first
collection of Tomdispatch interviews.
