Unspeak
Page 12
The naming of operations in the twenty-first century has represented an apex of selective justification and jingoism. CENTCOM originally dubbed the US invasion of Afghanistan Operation Infinite Justice, until Muslims pointed out that, according to their religion, only Allah could dispense infinite justice.12 It was changed to Operation Enduring Freedom, another phrase expressing a wish as to the result: for who could be certain at the operation’s start that the ‘freedom’, whether it was supposed to belong to Americans or Afghans, would indeed endure? It also contained a grammatical ambiguity that proved rather a hostage to fortune. You could read it as meaning that the freedom brought to Afghanistan by US troops was something to be endured rather than enjoyed: the same kind of pun as had previously been exploited in, for example, the title of Ian McEwan’s novel, Enduring Love. Human Rights Watch appropriated the phrase in this ironical way in its report ‘Enduring Freedom’, about the excessive violence practised by American forces in Afghanistan.13 By contrast, the British military, once notable for its sick sense of humour – a mine-laying operation in Yemen in 1964 had been dubbed Operation Eggshell14 – was now rather more subtle. UK involvement in Enduring Freedom was given the classily classical name Operation Veritas. Did calling it by the Latin for ‘truth’ mean that the intent was to find out the truth, or that the British were going along with it because its public justification – that Al Qaeda operated in Afghanistan – was on this occasion true? Any notion of certitude about truth or freedom was absent from the British involvement in the subsequent war in Iraq, which was called Operation Telic. From the Greek telos, meaning end or purpose, the effect of Telic was perhaps to say that there was indeed a purpose in invading that country, while remaining agnostic as to what that purpose actually was, and looking forward to the day when the purpose was accomplished and forces could be withdrawn.
Public American names for actions in occupied Iraq showed no such reserve, but seemed rather to increase in bellicosity as the situation deteriorated. Operations Iron Hammer or Resolute Sword had a ‘punitive’ ring, wrote former British minister Robin Cook, implying ‘that even senior officers [saw] their objective as intimidating Iraqis rather than winning them over’.15 There were, moreover, unfortunate echoes: Iron Hammer was the exact English equivalent of Eisenhammer, a Luftwaffe plan to destroy Soviet generators in 1943.16
Operation names in the ‘war on terror’ as a whole followed a pattern of rhetorical inflation and inevitably diminishing returns: what Churchill would have criticised merely as ‘boastful and overconfident’ gave way to names that were in danger of spiralling into pure nonsense. Operation Epic Fury was an intelligence operation supporting Enduring Freedom:17 if it hoped to borrow the glamour of Homer’s Achilles, the exemplar of epic fury, it may be supposed that the namer did not remember that the Greek hero’s rage was inspired by the death of his male lover, since the US military was not noted for its enlightened attitude towards homosexuality. Meanwhile, an Army project to provide portable electronic devices adopted the brash biblical allusion of the name Genesis II18 (the code-name Genesis I is not recorded, presumably reserved for the divine operation that created the universe; the sequel was thus of similarly cosmic importance); and an ‘advanced concept technology demonstration’ in 2001-2 was christened Krimson Sword,19 which recalled, no doubt by tasteless accident, the Ku Klux Klan’s habit of spelling as many words as possible with an initial K. (It is particularly strange to remember, in the age of the ‘war on terror’, that white supremacists call their bible the Kloran.)
Operation names, wrote Churchill sternly, ‘ought not to be names of a frivolous character […] They should not be ordinary words often used in other connections.’20 In reading through William Arkin’s Code Names, a massive compendium of both public ‘nicknames’ and classified codenames used by the US in recent decades, one sees that the sheer number of operations indulged in by that country after the Second World War eventually rendered these rules unworkable. A more relaxed attitude was possible, too, in choosing names that were not intended to be released to the public. Patent absurdities among these include Comfy Sword, Utopian Angel, Flexible Anvil, and even, for a Marine exercise in Saudi Arabia, Infinite Anvil, on which one perhaps makes shoes for infinitely large horses. Occasionally, too, one must suspect deliberate mischief. A 1990s rocket-launch programme was awarded the somewhat rococo designation Zodiac Beauchamp, perhaps as a tribute to rock band Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction, whose 2003 live album was named Weapons of Mass Destruction. A joint US-United Arab Emirate exercise in 1999 was given the name Iron Fist, possibly by a PlayStation-owning military joker, since Iron Fist is the name of a post-apocalyptic martial-arts tournament in the popular game series Tekken.21 And there can be no possibility of coincidence with the name of a US-German air-combat exercise in 2001: it was called Millennium Falcon.22 Well, if you’re going to name a missile-defence project Star Wars, as Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s, why not go the whole hog? Osama bin Laden can be Darth Vader. Still, the name was an odd choice in this context: for in Star Wars, the Millennium Falcon was a smuggler ship that aided a small band of rebels in defeating a mighty military empire. Surely some mistake?
By mid-2005, however, there were signs that America’s public operation names, having run the gamut of enraged hammers, vengeful anvils, and infinite furies, had begun to shout themselves hoarse. Perhaps the budding of a new, more lovable strain of propaganda was evident in the name for the newest stage of Operation Iraqi Freedom. As part of the battle for ‘hearts and minds’ in the occupied country, US pilots were instructed to drop parachute-wearing cuddly toys on to the streets of Baghdad. It was announced as Operation Teddy Drop.23
Surgical strike
An ‘operation’ can also be a surgical procedure, and indeed this medical sense predates the military usage by nearly four hundred years.24 It is not certain that the first uses of the word in its modern military sense in the early eighteenth century were the result of a conscious borrowing from medical language, however, since other, more thematically neutral meanings of ‘operation’ – functioning, work, practical action – were already available. But in phrases such as ‘surgical strike’, which became a slogan of the Gulf War in 1991, the language of war clearly appropriated medical vocabulary. Why should this be so? It is possible to consider surgery in terms of physical intervention with saws, scalpels, and needles, a form of violence that serves a greater good: hurting some parts of the body so as to restore the whole to health. If surgery is a war against disease or dysfunction, it is the ideal example of a just war. No bleeding-heart liberal is on the side of the bacillus. To turn the metaphor around and use images and terms from medicine in describing actual war could in this way have the effect of justifying the military action in question.
Three specific implications arise from the use of the metaphor ‘surgical’ for military activity. The first is that the attack is precise. Just as we hope a surgeon will perform a procedure with the minimum possible damage to surrounding tissue, a ‘surgical strike’ is presumably one that is perfectly targeted and practises restraint, using the least amount of violence necessary to achieve the objective. The military metaphor usefully conflates precision with delicacy, the latter being a quality which few missiles possess. Even if a 500-pound bomb is ‘surgical’ in that it lands within centimetres of its intended target, it will spray indiscriminate destruction far and wide. The second, related implication is that, since modern surgery is performed on the unconscious, anaesthetised body, a ‘surgical strike’ will cause no pain or suffering.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded reference to ‘a so-called “surgical” strike’ is in the context of John F. Kennedy’s government debating whether to launch an immediate air attack on the Cuban missile sites in 1962.25 It subsequently became a common euphemism in Vietnam, where, according to one writer, ‘surgical strike’ meant ‘chasing and mowing down peasants from the air by spraying them with 8,000 bullets a minute’.26 The US bombing o
f Libya in 1986 was announced as a ‘surgical strike’:27 bombs landed on Qaddafi’s compound (killing his three-year-old adopted daughter), on a naval training school, on the French Embassy, and on a residential neighbourhood in Tripoli, killing an entire family and many others.28 In all more than a hundred civilians were killed, perhaps to be written off as complications arising from surgery, or the result of a regrettable iatrogenic (‘caused by the doctor’) illness. Subsequently, the rhetoric of ‘surgical strikes’ was employed widely in the 1991 Gulf War, and television news outlets eagerly replayed the videogame-style missile’s-eye-view clips of weaponry whizzing around city corners as though they represented the entire arsenal; the Pentagon later revealed that a mere 7 per cent of the ordnance dropped on Iraq was made up of the kind of guided bombs that could be accurately targeted.29 Nonetheless, the operation had certainly worked to restore health, if only to Americans themselves: President George H. W. Bush announced that the success of his war had cured the ‘Vietnam syndrome’.30
But ‘surgical strike’ has a third implication, this time about who the targets are. If the attack is surgery, it follows that what is being attacked is disease. The enemy are no longer human beings, but an impersonal sickness that must be eradicated by whatever means necessary. This idea has its forebears in talk of ‘sanitising’ targets in Vietnam, and the description of Jews as vermin or virus in Nazi Germany, along with that regime’s euphemism of ‘cleaning’ for mass murder, which later transmuted into the abominable phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’. Put this notion together with the concept of surgery and you are, it seems, irresistibly drawn to the modern version of such dehumanising language, which is to say that the enemy is a cancer. ‘We need to make a decision on when the cancer of Fallujah needs to be cut out,’31 a senior US officer was reported as saying in September 2004, which remark was characteristic of much rhetoric in the second Iraq war.
One reason why cancer is the epitome of frightening disease is because a tumour may spread, or ‘metastatise’, to different places in the body. Thus, to designate as a ‘cancer’ a group of enemies is already to make an argument about the urgent necessity for taking forceful action now, since the problem will only get worse later. Cancerous cells are those that have forgotten how to die: it is the job of the army to remind them. Both communism and terrorism had been routinely described as ‘cancers’ since the 1980s for this reason: if unchecked, it was implied, they were likely to creep silently around the world. And use of cancer imagery, along with an updated version of the Nazi infection trope, is common in contemporary apocalyptic anti-Semitism, such as the claim by Gaza cleric Ibrahim Mdaires that ‘the entire Islamic nation was lost because Israel is a cancer spreading through the body of the Islamic nation, and because Jews are a virus resembling AIDS, from which the entire world suffers’.32 This example shows how the rhetorical use of cancer imagery itself can metastatise, eventually abandoning all pretence at ‘surgical’ restraint. In March 2003, after Marines machine-gunned at least twelve civilians who were trying to cross a bridge in Iraq, one of the Marines told a reporter: ‘The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy. I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin’ Iraqi. No, I won’t get hold of one. I’ll just kill him.’33
In the remark about the ‘cancer of Fallujah’, the sickness had been pictured as a containable part that could be excised, leaving the rest of the population healthy. But the Marine’s image considered ‘the Iraqis’ in general to be ‘sick people’, the sickness was cancer, and the Marines were the drugs that would cure the Iraqis by killing them. (To a physician, chemotherapy means any treatment with drugs, but it is used by the public to refer to cancer treatment. As it happens, cancer chemotherapy originated when it was noticed that the chemical weapon mustard gas, used offensively in the First World War, attacked white blood cells; in the 1940s, physicians began testing it on patients with advanced lymphomas.34) The soldier was speaking extempore, and was clearly shocked by the first-ever suicide bombing recorded in Iraq the previous week; but his style of thinking was reflected in the more deliberate pronouncements of senior officers and commanders, and its logical endpoint was that a perfectly healthy Iraq would be one with no Iraqis left. The runaway nihilism of such imagery is comparable to the famous (though perhaps apocryphal) comment attributed to a US official in the Vietnam war: ‘It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.’
While describing their operations as cancer treatment, US and British forces were conducting a rather poorly controlled form of radiotherapy by firing hundreds of thousands of shells made of ‘depleted uranium’.35 This name itself is a term of Unspeak, implying that it is considerably safer or weaker than naturally occurring uranium: in fact both are mainly constituted of uranium-238; ‘depleted’ uranium is only depleted in that it contains about half the amount of the highly radioactive fissile isotope uranium-235.36 It is what is left over after the processing of uranium for nuclear fuel; it may also be ‘contaminated’ with uranium-236 and plutonium. In 2000, the US Energy Secretary admitted that thousands of workers at one of the main US depleted-uranium manufacturing plants in Paducah, Kentucky, had suffered ‘cancer and early death’.37 Ammunition made from depleted uranium, first used in the Gulf War when between 300 and 800 tons of it were deposited on Iraq,38 gives off highly toxic dust particles on impact which ‘can be blown around and inhaled by civilians for years to come’.39 It has been blamed for a tenfold increase in birth defects and cancers in areas of Iraq where its use was concentrated in 1991.40 Inducing cancer in the Iraqi population would certainly be a novel means of curing it.
One journalist finessed the imagery of disease by hiding it in a term of jargon with which few readers could have been familiar, reporting in April 2004 how forces had begun ‘debriding Fallujah of its guerrillas’.41 Debriding, more properly ‘débridement’, means ‘the removal from a wound, etc., of damaged tissue or foreign matter’;42 or ‘the surgical removal of lacerated, devitalized, or contaminated tissue’.43 Thus the guerrillas in the town of Fallujah represented ‘damaged’ or ‘contaminated’ tissue, or even ‘devitalized’, a synonym for necrotic or dead tissue. If they were indeed already considered dead, then the surgical procedure would be a simple matter of clearing away dead matter for the good of the town as a whole. The implements chosen for this delicate operation included helicopter-fired missiles and ‘500-pound GBU-12 laser-guided bombs’44 launched from fighter aircraft. Marines blocked the roads leading to the city’s only two hospitals:45 metaphorical surgery was the only acceptable kind. Subsequent estimates of the number of Iraqis killed by the ‘debriding’ ranged from 264 to 600.46 Even so, it was considered necessary to conduct another assault on that city eight months later, whose code-name, Operation Phantom Fury (more Star Wars echoes), showed no residual trace of surgical care.
One purpose of débridement is to prevent an infection taking hold: so, like the image of cancer, its use in a military context represents a fear of the spread of disease. For other purposes, however, it may be useful to claim that the spread has already happened: that the infection is system-wide, and so all measures may be justified in order to save the patient. In this way Daniel Senor, a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, defended the attack on Fallujah by saying: ‘It is critical that we cleanse the Iraqi body politic of the poison that remains here after 35 years of Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian rule.’47 This remarkable image had clearly been agreed at the top, for in the same week CPA chief Paul Bremer had said on NBC: ‘There is a lot of poison built up in the Iraqi body politic.’48 The ‘body politic’ was a much-worked-over image in medieval and Renaissance thinking, often used to furnish a ‘natural’ justification for emerging ideas of the nation, its parts all working in harmony This standard image is offered, for example, by a citizen in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: ‘The kingly crowned head, the vigilant eye, / The counsellor heart, the arm our soldier, / Our steed the leg, the tongue our trumpeter.’49 Now, to sa
y that Iraq in 2004 actually had a ‘body politic’ was more wish than fact. Nonetheless, if it existed, and if it was poisoned, it was no doubt necessary, as Coriolanus himself had insisted before the senators, ‘To jump a body with a dangerous physic / That’s sure of death without it.’50
Terrific service
If the military appropriation of medical language serves to dehumanise the enemy and recast war as the restoration of health, another purpose is served by borrowings from the vocabulary of bureaucracy. An example is furnished by the accouncement that May 2005 in the US would be Military Spouse Appreciation Month:
Military Spouse Appreciation Month is this month, and there will be some announcements and some other activities associated with that tomorrow and through the weekend. We, obviously, always talk about how we recruit soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, but we retain families, and we retain families largely because of military spouses and the terrific service that they provide as well. We honor them, and this is the month where we will be taking particular time to honor them.51
Why exactly are military spouses so wonderful? Because of ‘the terrific service that they provide’. Now, ‘service’ originally meant the condition of being a servant, and from its earliest appearances in the thirteenth century, it was also used in the sense of obeisance to a supernatural master, God.52 So a gathering in a church was also called a service. From here the word was extended to the notion of fealty and righteous service to a king (ruling, after all, by divine right), then to loyalty to his army, then to the country as a whole. So the almost sacred idea of ‘service’ in the military, particularly in the modern US, has its roots in the religious meaning. But the military spouses being celebrated above are not said to be in service in this sense; they are instead providing a ‘terrific service’. To do someone a service has long meant simply to do a favour, but to provide a service is different: it is a specifically commercial usage in the modern idiom, not recorded before the twentieth century.53 (In 1919, a Ladies’ Home Journal article explained to its readers the newfangled concept of ‘self-service’ in a New York department store’s grocery section: ‘the customers, not the store, provide the service.’)54 Even if we refrain also from pointing out that ‘to service’ also means ‘to have sex with’, the notion of soldiers’ wives and husbands as service providers, offering valuable logistical support, is an illuminating example of the military’s instrumentalist view of human beings, even those human beings who have not volunteered specifically to be instruments.