All sorts of goodies at NRO today. Here is a nice piece of sarcasm.
November 14, 2003, 9:28 a.m.
The T-Word
Denis Boyles
It was close one, but last week, the U.S. lost the war in Iraq.
I only have this stack of Brit mags and newspapers to go by, but apparently, what happened is that what Dominique de Villepin began describing as a "spiral of violence" has now turned into a maelstrom of mayhem, with the U.S. military flailing wildly and ineffectively against a brave cadre of rebels in Iraq, while in Washington, Bush is taking the advice of the French, who know how to handle this kind of situation, and running for cover to insure his reelection. Meanwhile, according to Max Hastings in The Spectator, the British are "furious" at America for not being smart enough to be British.
The brave rebels bit I picked up in The Observer, where the headline "US turns wrath on resistance fighters" definitely gives terrorists a new social cache. France, I think, had "resistance fighters." They fought Nazis. I'm told by a correspondent that NPR's Baghdad reports use the same term — "resistance fighters" — to describe really bad truck drivers carrying serious hazmat.
To paraphrase Bill Clinton, words sometimes have meaning. That's why the press is habitually shy about calling a terrorist a terrorist. After all, one man's terrorist is another man's resistance fighter, especially if the man works for the Observer.
May I digress? (It's the weekend, after all.) Reuters is the pioneer of this kind of well-mannered nomenclature, but the news pages of the Wall Street Journal are not far behind. For years — and for all I know, to this very day — the editor of the WSJ's "World Briefs" column refused to use the word "terrorist" to describe a terrorist. Wherever car bombs went off outside public buildings or suicide bombers mingled with casual diners, the felons were described in "World Briefs" as "rebels", "militants" and "activists" — kind of like James Dean, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. And this all went on long after 9/11, when people described in "World Briefs" as "fundamentalists" rode planes into the World Trade Center. Hmmm. That Billy Graham character. He's kind of fundamental, isn't he?
Even as the Journal's editorial page lambasted Reuters for its own whitewashing lingo, the only time I can recall seeing terrorists described as terrorists on the Journal's front page was when one of the paper's executives issued a statement following the murder by activists of Daniel Pearl. The exec used the T-word. The Journal quoted him, thus putting the word safely behind quotation marks, but the news side of the Journal couldn't quite bring itself to follow suit. In the news pages of the WSJ, as in most of the European press, there may be a war on terrorism, but, fortunately, there are no terrorists. Instead, there are Americans waging war on resistance fighters.
Anyway, where were we? Right, we were discussing defeat and retreat. To learn about Bush's desperate search for an acceptable way to say oncle!, I relied of course on the BBC, whose Paul Reynolds explained that the US is no longer looking for victory in rebuilding Iraq, but anxiously seeking to put "a viable exit strategy in place before the presidential campaign gets under way properly next year." Of course, that is a blueprint for defeat with and political disgrace all in one neat package. But it will capture the Kucinich cohort, for sure.
As I was going through all this, I had a houseguest, a chap who had just left his prestigious, babe-magnet of a job at the San Francisco Chronicle to take up the more honorable business of writing a book about grandmothers. We discussed how America lost the war in Iraq and concluded that, really, a school bus filled with militants could defeat the United States on the ground, so long as they had a sufficient supply of landmines, rocket- and grenade-launchers and demo-derby vehicles. We figured all it takes is media-savvy sensibility, a largely hysterical press corps, and an atrocity every day or two. If you're a rebel or militant or whatever, and you get a Hummer to roll past your bomb, you have a global PR machine primed and more than ready to promote your product — that would be the explosion — until it was a full-fledged "spiral of violence." If you can pull that off, in a few weeks, you'll have POTUS diving for cover.
Actually, a few days was all it took. You can follow along on the Guardian's helpful "Timeline: Iraq" feature. There's the morning of October 27, when a bunch of — there they are again! — "resistance fighters" launched a rocket at Baghdad's Rashid hotel. And there's the downing of a Chinook near Fallujah on November 2, in which 16 U.S. soldiers died. And there's a Black Hawk down, just like in the movies. And of course the demolition of the Italian military complex in Nassiriyah, only days ago. That brings us up to now, practically, with today's Guardian announcing a "radical rethink" by the U.S. Of course, there's always the chance that the "rethink" might be to stop trying to win the war in the newspapers, where all quagmires live, thrive and grow big and strong — until they inevitably become defeats.
I mention all this, because this represents, more or less, the way the British public is being led to understand the war their own forces are fighting with us. That understanding will be tested in a few days when George Bush comes to visit Tony Blair. As David Frum has already noted here, sending Bush to Britain is the diplomatic equivalent of buying Enron because you think your Tyco shares might tank.
There are only a few things worse than losing in Iraq. I think one of them is losing Britain as America's traditional ally. A few days of angry street demos and U.S. flag burnings will help further that cause enormously. To do his part, Sidney Blumenthal, the Tom Boswell of the Clinton administration, appeared in the Guardian's pages to help Britons understand better what American honor really means:
Tony Blair, about to welcome George Bush to London with pomp and circumstance, has assumed the mantle of tutor to the unlearned president.
Bush originally came to Blair determined to go to war in Iraq, but without a strategy. Blair instructed him that the casus belli was Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, urged him to make the case before the UN, and — when the effort to obtain a UN resolution failed — convinced him to revive the Middle East peace process, which the president had abandoned. The road map for peace was the principal concession Blair wrested from him.
The prime minister argued that renewing the negotiations was essential to the long-term credibility of the coalition goals in Iraq and the whole region. But within the Bush administration that initiative was systematically undermined. Now Blair welcomes a president who has taught him a lesson in statecraft that he refuses to acknowledge.
Blumenthal then lays out the details of Bush's betrayal of Blair. His conclusion:
Blair provided Bush with a reason for the war in Iraq, and led him to express his plan for peace for the Middle East, preventing Bush from appearing a reckless and isolated leader. In return, the teacher's seminar on the Middle East has been dropped.
Harold Macmillan remarked that after empire the British would act towards the Americans as the Greeks to the Romans. Though the Greeks were often tutors to the Romans, Macmillan neglected to mention that the Greeks were slaves.
Blumenthal neglected to mention that the Greeks so valued what Rome had given them that they insisted on calling themselves "Romans" centuries after the fall of Rome.
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