Unspeak
Page 14
Weapons of mass destruction, including evil chemistry and evil biology, are all matters of great concern, not only to the United States but also to the world community95
Evil chemistry. Evil biology. Picture, if you will, the evil Iraqi researchers in their evil laboratories conducting an evil version of science. This evil science is the dark side. It is not to be confused with the good science that gave birth to the megadeath-inducing Peacekeeper, created the 30,000 tons of chemical weapons stockpiled in the US,96 and allowed the US Army to be granted, in 2003, the patent for a new type of grenade designed to disperse ‘biological agents’ and ‘chemical agents’.97 The notion that science itself can be inherently morally inflected recalled the bogus appeals to a notion of ‘sound science’ in environmental and genetic debates. And ‘evil biology’ further conjured up useful images of hideously deformed monsters lurking somewhere in Iraq, if not just in Ashcroft’s id. Evil chemistry and evil biology lead to evil only will, as Yoda might say.
After the invasion of Iraq, no WMD were found. True, someone had the parts of a pre-1991 nuclear centrifuge buried in his back yard,98 but that alone was never going to produce the fantasised mushroom cloud. What to do? The phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction-related program activities’,99 enacting a twofold retreat from claims about the actual existence of weapons, was found rather cumbersome by a suddenly sceptical post-war press. Another tack was possible: just redefine ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to mean whatever happens to be in front of your nose. In April 2005, new Iraqi President Jalal Talabani proved himself agreeably on-message when he wrote, in a letter to Tony Blair: ‘Saddam himself was […] Iraq’s most dangerous WMD.’100 In the interim, three Britons were indicted in the US for planning an attack with ‘weapons of mass destruction’, identified not as nukes, viruses, or evil chemistry, but home-made bombs: ‘improvised explosive devices’, in the jargon all too familiar from the situation in Iraq. Deputy Attorney General James Comey explained: ‘A weapon of mass destruction in our world goes beyond [chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons] and includes improvised explosive devices.’101 Comey’s world, let us hope, is well insulated from the one the rest of us live in, or the contradiction might prove impossible for him to bear. For if a home-made explosive device is a WMD, what is the Mother Of All Bombs?
On the moon
Cheerleading operation names; medical and business metaphors; sanitised names for weapons and killing: they all help us to support a war without having to think about what war is really like. They make war normal. They may even make it fun: in April 2004, the Fox News Channel executive John Moody instructed his reporters: ‘Let’s refer to the US marines we see in the foreground as “sharpshooters” not snipers, which carries a negative connotation.’102 Indeed: ‘sharpshooters’ speaks of sporting excellence, as though the soldiers were practising on clay pigeons or competing in the Olympics; it also evokes the golden age of the American Wild West and celebrities such as performing cowgirl Annie Oakley. Any unfortunate negative connotations of long-range killing are to be suppressed.
The ever-increasing levels of abstraction in modern military language are well illustrated in the evolution of one term. The containers in which dead soldiers were returned from Vietnam to the US were called ‘body bags’, for the Gulf War they were renamed ‘human remains pouches’, and for the 2003 Iraq war they became ‘transfer tubes’.103 As George W. Bush’s mother asked: ‘Why should we hear about body bags and deaths […] why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?’104 Why indeed? In this respect it was a brilliant stroke of Donald Rumsfeld’s in August 2002 to translate the mise-en-scène of the planned Iraq war into the realm of pure science fiction. He preferred to speak of going to war against the moon.
The construct I would suggest would be, urn, what are the benefits – what are the advantages and disadvantages of not acting? And of course, the advantage of not acting – against the moon – would be that no-one could say that you acted. They would say, ‘Isn’t that good – you didn’t do anything against the moon’. The other side of the coin of not acting against the moon, in the event that the moon posed a serious threat, would be that you then suffered a serious loss, and you’re sorry after that’s over And in weighing the things, you would have to make a judgement... or not... do you think you are acting most responsibly by avoiding the threat that could be characterised – X numbers of people dying, innocent people, and it’s that kind of a evaluation one would have to make.105
War on the moon, we may imagine, would take place in a Kubrickian poetic slow-motion, to a soundtrack of lush Viennese waltzes. No grimy body bags or death. To meditate on such a possibility was the duty of beautiful minds everywhere: they would thereby be insulated from the realities of the ‘war on terror’.
6
Terror
Acts of terrorism
In August 2005, John Bolton, America’s new ambassador to the UN, attempted to torpedo six months of negotiations by unilaterally submitting a new draft, studded with hundreds of deletions and insertions, of a proposed General Assembly statement on the organisation’s aims. The document made fascinating reading, subtly revealing the US stance on many international questions. Here, for instance, is a passage that intended to condemn terrorism. Bolton’s deletion is crossed out; his additions are in bold type.
65. […] We affirm that the targeting and deliberate killing of civilians and non-combatants by terrorists cannot be justified or legitimized by any cause or grievance, and we declare that any such action intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to others, when the purpose of such an act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population or to compel a Government or an international organization to carry out or to abstain from any act cannot be justified on any grounds and constitutes an act of terrorism.1
On first sight these might look like trivial changes. Why, for example, did ‘by terrorists’ need to be inserted in a passage which was ostensibly all about terrorism? To understand what Bolton was doing, it will help to step back a bit and consider how the term ‘terrorism’ itself is used. Its meaning has long been debated, because different people start from different ideas of what cases ought to count as terrorism, and then adjust their definitions to fit. Let us, for the sake of argument, start here: terrorism is the threat or use of violence against a civilian population in order to coerce the leaders of that population into a particular political decision.
Coercion works through fear, the essential emotional component of terrorism. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘terrorism’ exclusively in these terms: ‘A policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted; the employment of methods of intimidation; the fact of terrorizing or condition of being terrorized.’ Contemporary terrorism induces fear by its random choice of victims among the chosen target population. A Palestinian bomb might go off in an Israeli bar or a shopping mall. An Islamist bomb might go off in a Spanish railway station or a Bali nightclub. Sites of civil society that are normally assumed safe are turned into venues for indiscriminate murder. You could be next. A government is supposed to be able to assure the safety of its citizens, so a terrorised population may exert pressure on its rulers to give in to the demands of the perpetrators of terrorism; at least, that is what the latter hope.
So much is uncontroversial. The difficulties arise when people begin to contest specific terms in the definition. For instance, do those targeted really need to be ‘civilians’? If they do not, the definition broadens rapidly: then all strikes on military targets could be called terrorism. We should have to call ‘terrorism’, for example, the attacks on Nazi occupiers by Resistance fighters in France during the Second World War; or the attacks on Soviet occupiers by the Afghan mujahidin during the 1980s. Indeed the term is sometimes used in this way. Princeton professor of international law Richard Falk writes of ‘the generally heroic imagery used to describe anti-Nazi terrorism in German-occupied Europe’.2 British Conservative MP Julian Amery, re
calling his experiences in Britain’s Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, said: ‘I was a terrorist myself once. One of my duties was the recruitment of people to carry out terrorist actions against the Nazis in Yugoslavia and Albania.’3
But then almost every official act of war could also be classed as terrorism. After all, the object of battle is not to obliterate every last man on the enemy side, only to kill enough of them so that the commanders are eventually more afraid of continuing than they are of surrendering. This is coercion through fear by the use of violence to persuade the target group’s leaders to make a particular choice. But if we call it ‘terrorism’, the term becomes so widely applicable as to be useless. So the definition, it might seem, needs to be restricted to non-military victims.
However, here there are difficulties too. During the 1970s and 1980s, the IRA attacked both military and civilian targets in Britain: both army barracks and pubs were bombed. The IRA claimed that their attacks on soldiers were part of their ‘war’ against the ‘occupation’ of Northern Ireland by British forces; the British government termed their actions ‘terrorism’. In 1982, the IRA set off a bomb in Hyde Park, London, which killed two members of the Horse Guards regiment and seventeen spectators. Inasmuch as it was aimed at a military target, was this an act of terrorism? You might want to say that the Horse Guards, being mainly ceremonial soldiers, were ‘noncombatants’, a term that is often used in conjunction with ‘civilians’, as in the UN draft’s definition: ‘civilians or noncombatants’. But ‘noncombatant’ is vague: one might be a noncombatant one week and a combatant the next. Attacking a column of infantry who are marching to a battle elsewhere could be said to target ‘noncombatants’, since they are not actually engaged in fighting at the time of the attack; and yet they are still soldiers.
Furthermore, the category of ‘civilian’ itself is regularly challenged by those who perpetrate terrorism. Those acting in furtherance of the Palestinian cause often attempt to justify their killing with a claim that there is no such thing as a ‘civilian’ in Israeli society. Thus Hamas leader Aby Shanab: ‘“Everyone over seventeen is recruited into the army […] The army occupying the West Bank is mainly made up of reservists,” he added, claiming that the distinction between soldier and civilian is blurred in Israel.’4 Elsewhere, Osama bin Laden has justified his killing of American civilians by arguing that, since they pay the taxes that fund US foreign policy, they are culpable for its actions.5 Muslim cleric Hani Al-Siba’i, director of London’s Al-Maqreze Centre for Historical Studies, gave his interpretation in the wake of the July 2005 attacks in London: ‘The term “civilians” does not exist in Islamic religious law […] There is no such term as “civilians” in the modern Western sense. People are either of Dar Al-Harb or not.’6 Dar Al-Harb is territory controlled by ‘unbelievers’, who are thus all, on this view, fair game. It is interesting that perpetrators of terrorism explain their actions in this way: they essentially concede that the killing of innocents is wrong, but go on to claim that those whom they kill are not innocent.
It might therefore be tempting to adjust our definition of terrorism so that it speaks of ‘innocent’ victims rather than ‘civilian’ victims. But to say ‘innocent’ tout court, rather than ‘innocent of a particular crime’, turns innocence from a legal into a metaphysical category, and thus one that is even more contestable than ‘civilian’. To speak of ‘innocent victims’ is to veer into an area of moralising terminology, to imply good on one side and hence evil on the other; it is even to idealise the dead, to sanctify them, perhaps eventually to think of them as martyrs – just as Islamist suicide bombers are celebrated as martyrs by their fellows. And therein lies the propagandistic power of terrorism: its twisting of social categories into metaphysical ones on both sides. Far from all terrorism is religiously motivated, or even religiously described by its perpetrators, but the phenomenon does in this way evince a quasi-religious concept of justice, as based on a kind of original sin. Moral culpability is assigned to one’s very existence in a particular polity. And if we speak of ‘innocence’ and ‘evil’ in response, then the perpetrators have won the struggle to define the frame of reference.
The category of terrorism as normally used further implies something about the perpetrators: that they are a small group using limited resources for maximum psychological effect. Just as one might worry that allowing strikes on military targets to be called ‘terrorism’ stretches the word too far, one might wish to say that ‘terrorism’ cannot be committed by military forces either. We might wish to limit the application of the concept to the traditional examples of perpetrators I have so far mentioned: the IRA, Hamas, Al Qaeda, and so on. But this argument is more difficult to justify.
Remember that people killed by terrorism are not the people the perpetrators wish to persuade. They are exemplars, bargaining chips. There is a disconnect between victims and audience; the violence is a warning to people other than those targeted. (The writer Brian Jenkins has summed up this fact in the catchphrase ‘Terrorism is theatre’; a US Army lieutenant colonel went one better, telling a reporter in Baghdad in 2003: ‘Terrorism is Grand Theater.’7) Unfortunately this, too, is true of many government actions. Consider the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. The US had not identified every citizen in those cities as being an indispensable part of the Japanese war effort. On the contrary, the bombings were designed as an awful demonstration: to instil such fear in the Japanese government that they would surrender. The bomb spoke thus: Give up, or there’ll be more where this came from. It also sent a powerful message to a secondary audience: Joseph Stalin. On this measure, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are, by many orders of magnitude, the greatest acts of terrorism in history. (This description, by the way, is separate from an argument about whether they were right or wrong. Some people claim that Hiroshima was justified because it ended the war sooner, saving countless American and Japanese lives, etc. The truth or otherwise of such a claim is not relevant to the fact that in means and intention, it was an act of terrorism.) The Russian invasion of Chechnya in 1994 made no attempt to distinguish ‘civilians’ from others in its destruction, aiming to terrorise the entire population into submission. Unarmed villagers were summarily shot, indiscriminate vacuum bombs were regularly used, and 25,000 civilians were killed in Grozny alone.8 The Russians themselves simply termed ‘terrorists’ anyone bearing arms in the attacked territory, and called their own war of terrorism the ‘antiterrorist special operation of the Russian troops’.9
States themselves, of course, fiercely resist any characterisation of their actions as terrorism. Richard Falk: ‘With the help of the influential media, the state over time has waged and largely won the battle of definitions by exempting its own violence against civilians from being treated and perceived as “terrorism.” Instead, such violence was generally discussed as “uses of force,” “retaliation,” “self-defense” and “security measures.”’10
So now we can see exactly what John Bolton was doing by adding the seemingly innocent phrase ‘by terrorists’ to the UN draft. The effect was to exclude any denunciation of the killing of civilians by states, and thus particularly to foreclose any description of US actions as ‘terrorism’. It did not seem to worry Bolton that his amended version ended up as question-begging: for if you use the term ‘terrorists’ within a definition of ‘terrorism’, you are no further along than when you started. The question remains as to who exactly might count as a ‘terrorist’ – a problem to which we shall shortly return. Secondly, Bolton’s alteration of the description of ‘such’ acts (again, meaning acts committed by ‘terrorists’) from targeting ‘civilians or non-combatants’ to simply ‘others’, denies that ‘terrorism’ should apply only to attacks on civilians, and encourages strikes on military targets to be called ‘terrorism’ as well. As we shall see later, this was a useful terminological strategy to help define the US enemy in Iraq.
Curiously, many internal governmental definition
s of terrorism do not explicitly exclude the possibility of its perpetration by states. The FBI defines terrorism as: ‘the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives’.11 A recent US Treasury definition reads: ‘the term “terrorism” means an activity that — (i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and (ii) appears to be intended — (A) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (B) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (C) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking.’12 The widening of the application of terrorism to attacks on ‘property’ and not just people in these definitions is notable – presumably, then, the smashing of a McDonald’s restaurant window by anti-globalisation protesters could count as terrorism. But these descriptions still do not restrict possible perpetrators to non-state groups. Perhaps because it might be useful to reserve the option of accusing other states of terrorism when necessary – as the US did with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
On occasion, the fact that states can commit terrorism has been acknowledged by those in responsible positions. During the Second World War, the MP Richard Stokes denounced in Parliament the firebombing of Dresden and other acts, to which he referred as ‘terror bombing’.13 And Winston Churchill himself ‘acknowledged in a memo to the Air Ministry that the raid on Dresden and others like it were acts of terror that should be stopped, “even though we call it by another name”’.14 Meanwhile, in 2003, thirty Israeli helicopter and fighter pilots refused to continue bombing Palestinian cities, and were sacked from the Air Force. The last straw for these men was ‘the dropping of the one-tonne bomb […] on the home of a Hamas military leader, Salah Shehade, killing him and 14 of his family, mostly children’: