Words matter. Often thats

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Words matter. Often, that’s just a conceit of people in the word business. But it’s also true.

A few moments ago I was in a cab heading toward the DC train station. On the radio, the president was commenting on the recent troubles in Iraq and the broader war on terrorism.

He said something to this effect: We’re in a war on terrorism. When the civilized world expands democracy it’s a challenge to the terrorists’ totalitarian vision. And so they strike back with increasing terror. They’re hoping the civilized world will flinch. But we’re not going to flinch, and so forth.

I understand what the president’s saying. I recognize a general truth in it.

But the generality, vagueness and abstraction is the problem. They are becoming the engines of policy incoherence and the cover for domestic bad-actors who want to get this country into fights few Americans signed up for.

We’ve heard critiques of this phrase, the ‘war on terror,’ ever since 9/11. But only now, I think, are we seeing the full effects of its mystification. We’re at war with al Qaida and any and all radical Islamist groups who threaten mass casualty terrorism against America or her vital interests abroad. We are at war, even if it’s a war fought by non-conventional means against non-conventional, non-state entities. That’s who we’re at war with: a loose-knit network of radical Islamist groups who practice mass-casualty terrorism against us.

Radical Islamist revisionism is a primary foreign policy challenge for the US and probably will remain so for a very long time. That understanding should (and already has) decisively shape our policies toward the various states in the Middle East. But we’re not at war with it any more than we were or could be ‘at war’ with right-wing or left-wing extremism in the second half of the 20th century.

Just as vague and abstract language makes for bad prose, it is also the handmaiden of bad policy and the abettor of buck-passing.

All this talk about civilization, totalitarianism, fascism and terror is just preventing us from looking at what’s happening and recognizing what our own interests are. They also make it possible for some people to convince themselves that it’s not a screw-up that we’ve turned Iraq into a terrorist magnet. After all we’re at war with ‘the terrorists’ and it makes sense that ‘the terrorists’ would attack us anyway, if only in a new venue. And we always knew it would be a long fight, a long twilight struggle, and yada, yada, yada and the rest of it. Same with the mumbo-jumbo about totalitarianism.

Look at the difference thus far between Afghanistan and Iraq. In the first place, we drained the swamp. In the second, we’ve made the swamp.

It’s really that simple.

Admittedly, that’s an odd development from an administration so generally inimical to wetlands. But, you know, ironies abound.

Bear in mind that the author of these words is a fairly convinced Wilsonian, a strong supporter of our interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, someone who’s convinced that our values cannot be divorced from our national security interests, a believer in the power for good of American military might, and someone who thinks progressives who recoil at this administration’s excesses should avoid the safe-harbor of foreign policy Realism (creeping Scowcroftism).

But the White House is being run by men and women who’ve already made a lot of really stupid mistakes that are going to cost a lot of American lives, money and credibility. And now they’re trying to hide from accountability in their own idiot abstractions.

Latest Editors' Blog
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: