IN CHARACTERISTIC TWIST OF WORDS, BUSH GETS IT WRONG AGAIN By Georgie Anne Geyer
Tue Aug 15, 6:02 PM ET
WASHINGTON -- In some of history's super-secret governments, those who would seek knowledge are generally relegated to reading tea leaves or discovering secret messages written in lemon juice on parchment. How lucky we are! All we need to do to figure out what in God's name our government is going to do next is listen to how George W. Bush's words have changed.
If you haven't noticed, the newest catch phrase is "Islamic fascism." The president has repeated it innumerable times; it's a mantra meant to explain everything, as a third of Lebanon is bashed to bits in our name. He seems to savor the very taste of it on his tongue: Islaaamic ... fassschism. Sure scares me!
And why not? It is his way of signaling that any young Muslim who doesn't like him (or freedom, for goodness's sake) is almost certainly a fascist: a political untouchable after World War II, a pestilence upon the land that can be eliminated only by U.S. and Israeli air forces wiping out the soil upon which he feeds.
But the president has used the word with the kind of stunning casualness about meaning that only he (or perhaps Groucho Marx) can conjure up. Historically, fascism came out of Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany and was shackled to the state and to its nationality. Fascism meant a centralized autocracy, a nationalist regime with severely nationalist policies and regimentation of industry, commerce and finance, rigid censorship and the brutal suppression of the opposition. Fascism in Europe was also tied, by blood and not religion, to one people or one nationality.
Sorry, W., the Muslim radicals you are talking about are about as far from fascism as they are from communism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism or Hinduism. Al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad or the Taliban: Virtually all are, at least in origin, stateless groups. Nationality means nothing to them. They are scattered like choking bits of dust across the globe, in tiny secret cells, each operating on its own, each with its own interpretation of "jihad." Commerce and finance exist only insofar as they serve their militant needs.
So why would the president, no master of words even when playing his hand well, employ such an easily knocked-down concept to characterize what he obviously means to be the next target of his imperial wars in the Middle East after Afghanistan, Iraq and now Lebanon? Simple. Because he thinks it links him to his father's great cause, World War II; it makes any destructive thing he does acceptable, and at a time when most Americans want to lower the stakes, it gives him reason to up them.
But "Islamic fascism" is not the only extraordinary -- and dangerous -- misuse of language since the Lebanon war began. The Israelis have kept saying -- and Washington backed them up in their lethal foolishness -- that this time they are going to deal with the "root causes" of Hezbollah in this "different kind of war."
Instead, they have again dealt with the symptoms of the Middle East crisis, the offshoots of Israel's 1982 invasion and consequent occupation of Lebanon. It's the same manner they use to deal with the symptoms of the Palestinians' anti-Israelism -- by killing and dehumanizing more Palestinians. Addressing the root causes would mean returning to negotiating the Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty that one could almost touch in the mid-'90s; but we are dealing now with people who like war.
At the same time, both the United States and Israel, linked in the mind of the world like twins born with one body, keep insisting that Hezbollah and Hamas (and perhaps soon, the Shiite Sadr Army in Baghdad) can and must never become the state. Yet, history is filled with transitory guerrilla forces that became the political parties and armies of independent states: in North Vietnam, in Algeria, in East Pakistan, in South Africa, in Oman and even in Israel itself (the Irgun terrorists became the Likud Party).
From the very beginning of its state, Israel has despised the Arabs so frightfully that it could never call them, or their actions, by the right name; Israel is still "amazed" and "surprised" at having run up against a counterinsurgency capability in southern Lebanon -- yet it has fought one counterinsurgency after another since its formation in 1947.
So the United States of America, with all of its God-given blessings, now finds itself in an extraordinary position. We have put ourselves square in the middle of a war that will go on in the Middle East forever; that means we have given up our real position of power, which allows us to come in from outside and negotiate and decide.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military is issuing another counterinsurgency manual -- can one believe it? Even after the horrendous experiences of Vietnam, they never learned. And if the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh is right (and he usually is), then the U.S. collaborated with Israel to start the Lebanon war to get Hezbollah rockets out of the way before we invade Iran.
Meanwhile, the false words that our leaders employ to distract and mislead us go on and on. ("Six months in Iraq ... they'll greet us with flowers ... no insurgency ... no civil war ... roots of the problem ... Islamic fascism ...") Using the right words to define an action is a hard thing to do, particularly when essentially you're lying. |
