Attacking Libya - and the
dictionary By Jonathan Schell
The Barack Obama administration has come
up with a remarkable justification for going to
war against Libya without the congressional
approval required by the constitution and the War
Powers Resolution of 1973.
American planes
are taking off, they are entering Libyan air
space, they are locating targets, they are
dropping bombs, and the bombs are killing and
injuring people and destroying things. It is war.
Some say it is a good war and some say it is a bad
war, but surely it is a war.
Nonetheless,
the Obama administration insists it is not a war.
Why? Because, according to "United States
Activities in Libya", a 32-page report that the
administration released last week, "US operations
do not involve sustained fighting or active
exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they
involve the presence of US
ground troops, US casualties
or a serious threat thereof, or any significant
chance of escalation into a conflict characterized
by those factors."
In other words, the
balance of forces is so lopsided in favor of the
United States that no Americans are dying or are
threatened with dying. War is only war, it seems,
when Americans are dying, when we die. When only
they, the Libyans, die, it is something else for
which there is as yet apparently no name. When
they attack, it is war. When we attack, it is not.
This cannot be classified as anything but
strange thinking and it depends, in turn, on a
strange fact: that, in our day, it is indeed
possible for some countries (or maybe only our
own), for the first time in history, to wage war
without receiving a scratch in return. This was
nearly accomplished in the bombing of Serbia in
1999, in which only one American plane was shot
down (and the pilot rescued).
The epitome
of this new warfare is the predator drone, which
has become an emblem of the Obama administration.
Its human operators can sit at Creech Air Force
Base in Nevada or in Langley, Virginia, while the
drone floats above Afghanistan or Pakistan or
Yemen or Libya, pouring destruction down from the
skies. War waged in this way is without casualties
for the wager because none of its soldiers are
near the scene of battle if that is even the right
word for what is going on.
Some strange
conclusions follow from this strange thinking and
these strange facts. In the old scheme of things,
an attack on a country was an act of war, no
matter who launched it or what happened next. Now,
the Obama administration claims that if the
adversary cannot fight back, there is no war.
It follows that adversaries of the United
States have a new motive for, if not equaling us,
then at least doing us some damage. Only then will
they be accorded the legal protections (such as
they are) of authorized war. Without that, they
are at the mercy of the whim of the president.
The War Powers Resolution permits the
president to initiate military operations only
when the nation is directly attacked, when there
is "a national emergency created by attack upon
the United States, its territories or possessions,
or its armed forces." The Obama administration,
however, justifies its actions in the Libyan
intervention precisely on the grounds that there
is no threat to the invading forces, much less the
territories of the United States.
There is
a parallel here with the administration of George
W Bush on the issue of torture (though not,
needless to say, a parallel between the Libyan war
itself, which I oppose but whose merits can be
reasonably debated, and torture, which was wholly
reprehensible). President George W Bush wanted the
torture he was ordering not to be considered
torture, so he arranged to get lawyers in the
Justice department to write legal-sounding
opinions excluding certain forms of torture, such
as waterboarding, from the definition of the word.
Those practices were thenceforward called
"enhanced interrogation techniques".
Now,
Obama wants his Libyan war not to be a war and so
has arranged to define a certain kind of war - the
American-casualty-free kind - as not war (though
without even the full support of his own lawyers).
Along with Libya, a good English word war is under
attack.
In these semantic operations of
power upon language, a word is separated from its
commonly accepted meaning. The meanings of words
are one of the few common grounds that communities
naturally share. When agreed meanings are
challenged, no one can use the words in question
without stirring up spurious "debates", as
happened with the word torture.
For
instance, mainstream news organizations,
submissive to Bush's decisions on the meanings of
words, stopped calling waterboarding torture and
started calling it other things, including
"enhanced interrogation techniques", but also
"harsh treatment", "abusive practices" and so on.
Will the news media now stop calling the
war against Libya a war? No euphemism for war has
yet caught on, though soon after launching its
Libyan attacks, an administration official
proposed the phrase "kinetic military action" and
more recently, in that 32-page report, the term of
choice was "limited military operations". No doubt
someone will come up with something catchier soon.
How did the administration twist itself
into this pretzel? An interview that Charlie
Savage and Mark Landler of the New York Times held
with State Department legal adviser Harold Koh
sheds at least some light on the matter. Many
administrations and legislators have taken issue
with the War Powers Resolution, claiming it
challenges powers inherent in the presidency.
Others, such as Bush administration deputy
assistant attorney general John Yoo, have argued
that the constitution's plain declaration that
congress "shall declare war" does not mean what
most readers think it means, and so leaves the
president free to initiate all kinds of wars.
Koh has long opposed these interpretations
- and in a way, even now, he remains consistent.
Speaking for the administration, he still upholds
congress' power to declare war and the
constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution.
"We are not saying the president can take
the country into war on his own," he told the
Times. "We are not saying the War Powers
Resolution is unconstitutional or should be
scrapped or that we can refuse to consult
congress. We are saying the limited nature of this
particular mission is not the kind of
'hostilities' envisioned by the War Powers
Resolution."
In a curious way, then, a
desire to avoid challenge to existing law has
forced assault on the dictionary. For the Obama
administration to go ahead with a war lacking any
form of congressional authorization, it had to
challenge either law or the common meaning of
words. Either the law or language had to give.
It chose language.
Jonathan
Schell is the Doris M Shaffer Fellow at The
Nation Institute, and a Senior Lecturer at Yale
University. He is the author of several books,
includingThe
Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the
Will of the People. To listen to Timothy
MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which
Schell discusses war and the imperial presidency,
click here,
or download it to your iPodhere.
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