"War": What is it good for?

When I was growing up in London, I occasionally suffered a mild bout of cognitive disconnect when I heard words used for purposes which went slightly beyond my own ideas of what they referred to. For instance, when London Underground talked about their "trains", I would do one of those internal double-takes: trains, for me, were above ground, while the things which ran intermittently up and down the Northern Line were tubes. I had a similar experience when McDonald's would talk about how many "restaurants" they had: restaurants, for me, were places where a waiter would recite specials, and where you ate your food with cutlery.

I got a similar feeling when US presidents would talk about the "war on drugs" – similar, but different. In the "train" and "restaurant" scenarios, I reckoned that basically LU and McDonald's were perfectly right: they did, in fact, have trains and restaurants respctively, even if they weren't the kind of trains and restaurants I was used to. (But I'd still look askance at anybody who said that they took a train to a restaurant, when in fact they took the tube to a McDonald's.)

In the "war on drugs" scenario, I reckoned that the word "war" was being used metaphorically, and that although it wasn't a real war, the usage could be understood by considering it to be political rhetoric. I was helped along in this understanding by the fact that the leader of the war on drugs was known as the "drugs tsar" – clearly, he wasn't a real tsar, which meant that everything could be best understood as being mediated by a scrim of metaphor.

Which brings us, of course, to the "war on terror". I think that one of the differences between conservatives and liberals is that the former consider the war on terror to be a bit like the trains and the restaurants: not, perhaps, the kind of war you're used to, but a genuine war all the same. Whereas the liberals are more likely to consider it to be a metaphor, and are therefore much more likely to get upset when the US does something like invade a foreign country in its name.

And in fact, I think that many of the disagreements about the Bush administration's foreign policy basically come down to this largely semantic question. The hawks are saying "don't you understand, we're at war here", while the doves are saying "no, the 'war on terror' is a rhetorical device, not a prima facie justification for invading whomever you want".

Of course, we can all agree that the US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq were real wars, with real troops losing their lives in battles for the control of foreign countries. But the decision to go to war in those countries is maybe not as difficult to make if you consider yourself to be at war anyway. Looked at from that point of view, Afghanistan and Iraq are important parts of a much bigger war, rather than unprovoked and probably illegal invasions of independent states.

As a general rule, I think it's probably safe to say that how you read the phrase "war on terror" is a very good predictor of how you'll vote. Literalists will vote to re-elect the present administration, while those who consider the phrase to be more metaphorical are likely to vote Democratic.

This is bad news for the Democrats, I think. Whoever ends up running against Bush is going to have a very hard time of things trying to persuade Middle America that the war on terror is a metaphor – especially when most undecided voters are unlikely to even know what a metaphor is. (It's a curious characteristic of the US electoral system that towards the end of an election campaign, the people who still haven't made up their minds tend not to be the sharpest knives in the drawer. They're perfectly happy holding two or three contradictory opinions at once, and are as likely as not to simply vote for the candidate with the best hair.)

The problem is that the Bush administration has done a very good job of selling the war in Iraq as part of the war on terror, and therefore has a great response to anybody trying to say that the war on terror isn't a real war. All the Republicans need to do is point to Iraq, and the heroic troops serving and dying there under horrendous conditions: "you say that's not a real war"? Anybody trying to answer "no, you don't understand, the war on Iraq is a real war, but the war on terror isn't" is going to come off as a hair-splitter who has problems with Moral Clarity.

Maybe the Democrats should launch their own War on Obfuscatory Rhetorical Devices, like "war on terror", "death penalty" (to mean inheritance tax), and "healthy forests initiative" (the name of a pro-logging bill). I fear they'd find themselves on the losing side, however.

Posted by Felix at 14:42 EST

Comments

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Posted by: rachel at 4:41 EST, November 18, 2004