Going Nucular Page 5

  All of this has turned the naming of operations into a delicate art. In an article a few years ago in the quarterly of the U.S. Army War College, Lieutenant Colonel Gregory Sieminski offered several naming guidelines. First, he said, make the name meaningful. Don’t waste a public relations opportunity—remember that the operation name is the first bullet in the war of images. Second, identify and target the critical audience—decide whether your name is intended to fire up the troops, win domestic support, allay the concerns of other nations, or intimidate the enemy. And finally, make it concise and memorable—find a name that vividly evokes the characteristics of the operation that you want people to focus on.

  Those guidelines are good advice whether you’re naming a military operation or a new SUV: It all comes down to branding. And it’s no accident that the new-style names like Just Cause were introduced around the same time the cable news shows started to label their coverage of major stories with catchy names and logos. That practice began back in 1979 when ABC packaged its special coverage of the Iran hostage crisis as a late-night program called America Held Hostage, which later evolved into Night-line . But it was left to CNN and then the other cable news networks to routinely banner every major story, high or low. War in the Gulf, Death of a Princess, Flashpoint Kosovo, Boy in the Middle (that was Elián), Investigating the President, Power, Politics, and Pardons, The Search for Chandra Levy.

  Like the Pentagon’s operation names, the networks’ titles suggest a master narrative for what might otherwise seem a disorderly stream of events. It’s a convenient way of packaging stories like Elián Gonzáles or the Marc Rich pardon, which do have the feel of real-life miniseries. But the current crises are too far-reaching and open-ended to be comfortably wrapped by any banner.

  You could see the networks struggling to find a unifying theme for their coverage as they went from one banner to another: Assault on America, America Unites, America Rising, America on Alert, America Fights Back. But the pathos of the slogans seemed to diminish the enormity of the attacks and the events they had set in motion, from New York and Washington to Vero Beach, Florida, to Islamabad to Wall Street. And who knows where else, as events run their unpredictable course.

  But at least the networks can keep reframing their narrative from one day to the next. The military has to come up in advance with a name for an “operation” that is going to be waged over many years in many different theaters, and whose outcome would be kindly described as murky. I think of the lines from Robinson Jeffers’s I Shall Laugh Purely:

  History falls like rocks in the dark,

  All will be worse confounded soon.

  “Operation Enduring Freedom” was not an auspicious choice. Even if you set aside its ambiguity, the name would have made Churchill uneasy. He was partial to naming operations after Roman gods, war heroes, or famous racehorses—words with a vaguely heroic rumble that didn’t actually suggest anything about the goals of the mission. And he warned specifically against using words that imply an “overconfident sentiment.” He knew as well as anyone how history delights in throwing unforeseen ironies our way.

  Beleaguered Infidel

  Listening to the video of Osama bin Laden that was released after the United States began its attack on Afghanistan, I was struck by the way the interpreter had him calling President Bush the “head of the infidels” and insisting that the “army of infidels” must leave the land of Mohammed. Infidel is such a quaint word in English that I wondered whether it was a fair translation.

  With the help of an Egyptian colleague, I checked out the Arabic version of bin Laden’s message. He had used the word kaafir, which does indeed translate as “infidel.” Kaafir is one of those elastic terms that can stretch from out-and-out heathens to the heretics in the apartment upstairs. (The word exists in Hebrew, too, as kofer.) But in its strict meaning, kaafir refers to non-Muslims, particularly when they’re considered confrontationally.

  Muslim scholars divide the world between the Dar-al-Kufr, the land of the kaafirs, and the Dar-al-Islam, the land of the Muslims, with the Dar-al-Harb, or land of war, in the contested middle. In theory, Dar-al-Islam would be the Muslim counterpart to our word Christendom, but that word is pretty antiquated, too. The concept of Christendom hasn’t played much of a role in the Western psyche since the Poles and Germans turned back the Turkish armies at the siege of Vienna in 1683, the last time Muslim power was ever a serious threat to the West.

  Fresh Air Commentary, October 15, 2001

  That seems to be the story with a lot of the words that translators use to render the language of Islamic fundamentalism—they have a musty medieval sound. When someone talks about infidels, I have an image of the characters in Ivanhoe who were always dashing off to the Holy Land to fight the Saracen infidel. In fact it was an old-fashioned word even by Shakespeare’s time. He used it occasionally, particularly in the phrase “Turks and infidels,” but he wouldn’t have taken it seriously.

  In Modern English, infidel isn’t a word we ever use in earnest. People may style themselves infidels to suggest their defiance of some ruling orthodoxy. But it’s a sign of how thoroughly our culture has been secularized that not even Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson would use the word to describe nonbelievers, whatever their sexual orientation. It’s like calling someone a pagan or heathen—it makes you sound like a sergeant-major out of a Kipling story. That was the weirdest thing about Falwell’s rant about all the people who had brought the September 11 attacks down on America’s head—he said it was the fault of “the pagans, the abortionists, the feminists, the gays and lesbians, . . . [and] the ACLU.” True, there are some people around who like to style themselves pagans, but to most Americans, that word was a tip-off that Falwell wasn’t simply being intolerant—he was living in some other century.

  In fact the only time we still hear infidel used literally is when it’s put into the mouths of swarthy villains. That’s what was so odd about hearing the word in the voice-over translation of bin Laden’s video. It sounded like something from an Indiana Jones movie: “Die, infidel dog!” Infidel may have started its life as a home-grown English word, but it’s ending its days as a translation. Whether it’s ominous or comic, it isn’t a notion we use ourselves.

  That’s always the problem when you try to translate across a cultural divide—the words may be there, but they echo differently in the other person’s room. The difficulty can cut both ways. A couple of weeks ago the White House had to apologize when President Bush offhandedly described the war on terrorism as a “crusade.” Americans use that word without paying much attention to its origins, and we tend to forget that it has the root for “cross” buried in it, particularly when our Latin is shaky. But in Arabic, crusade translates as al-hamalat as-salibiyya, or “campaign of the cross,” and it can still evoke some vivid historical memories. It was disconcerting to hear bin Laden throw the term back in an utterly literal way, referring to Bush as a “big crusader.” For us, that’s a word you can only apply to a courageous politician, a cartoon rabbit, or a World War II British tank.

  It all underscores the problem that the U.S. faces as it tries to persuade the Muslim world that it isn’t engaged in a religious war. Things are bound to be misunderstood—you think of what Islamic fundamentalists are likely to make of the people at ball-parks singing God Bless America during the seventh-inning stretch, and how hard it would be to explain to them that it’s really an Irving Berlin show tune. You wonder how there could be any accommodation or understanding between the two sides, when they hear the same words so differently.

  In the end, though, it’s hard to believe that communication is hopeless. Not long ago I was talking about Bush’s “crusade” gaffe with a friend who teaches medieval Arabic history. Actually, she told me, if you wanted to do justice to “crusade” the way Bush used the word, you wouldn’t translate it with the Arabic phrase that means “campaign of the cross.” You’d use that word jihad. Jihad does have the meaning of a religious war, and in fa
ct it was used to describe the military response to the crusades. But like crusade, it can also mean any kind of personal moral struggle. “These days,” she said, “my jihad is being department vice-chair.”

  That made jihad feel a little less alien to me, and with it the corner of the Muslim mind that it inhabits. You wonder if the worlds are really so different that there can’t be any translation between them. It reminded me of what a translator told me once. Verbatim translations tend to sound odd, particularly when they have to bridge a vast cultural gulf. But if you root around you’ll usually find some other word that suggests a common point of understanding. If you’re a translator, he said, you have to believe that when it comes to the crunch, people can always find something to talk about. And sometimes the translation that takes people at their literal word is the one that winds up being unfaithful.

  It All Started with Robespierre

  The Washington Post recently disclosed that the global head of news for Reuters had written an internal memo asking reporters to avoid describing the airplane hijackers as terrorists. As he explained, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” And since then, Reuters dispatches have avoided using terrorism unless they were quoting someone.

  Given the circumstances, Reuters’s scruples seem misplaced—there are times when even-handedness can tip over into moral abdication. But the Reuters policy actually goes back more than twenty years, and reflects the equivocal history of the word itself.

  Terrorism is one of those terms like crusade, which began its life at a particular historical moment, before losing its capital letter to become a common noun. In 1792, the Jacobins came to power in France and initiated what we call the Reign of Terror and what the French call simply La Terreur. The Jacobin leader, Robespierre called terror “an emanation of virtue” and added that “Terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe and inflexible.” And in the months that followed, the severe and inflexible justice of the guillotine severed 12,000 counterrevolutionary heads before it got around to abbreviating Robespierre himself.

  San Francisco Chronicle, October 28, 2001

  Of course, not everyone shared Robespierre’s enthusiasm for the purifying effects of terror. One of the first writers to use terrorist in English was Edmund Burke, that implacable enemy of the French Revolution, who wrote in 1795 of “those hell-hounds called terrorists [who] are let loose on the people.”

  For the next 150 years, terrorism led a double life—a justifiable political strategy to some, an abomination to others. The Russian revolutionaries who assassinated Czar Alexander II in 1881 used the word proudly. And in 1905, Jack London described terrorism as a powerful weapon in the hands of labor, though he warned against harming innocent people.

  But for the press and most of the public, terrorist connoted bomb-throwing madmen. Politicians weren’t above using the word as a brush to tar socialists and radicals of all stripes, whatever their views of violence. When President William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist in 1901, Congress promptly passed legislation that barred known anarchists from entering the United States.

  By the mid-twentieth century, terrorism was becoming associated more with movements of national liberation than with radical groups, and the word was starting to acquire its universal stigma. One of the last groups willing to describe itself as terrorist was a Zionist organization called Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel), known earlier as the Stern Gang, who killed dozens of people when they set off a bomb in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946.

  Most of the Third-World movements that resorted to political violence in the 1950s and 1960s preferred terms like “freedom fighters” or “guerrillas” or “mujahedeen.” Terrorist was reserved for use as a condemnation by the colonial powers. That’s the point when news organizations started to become circumspect about using the word to describe groups like the Irish Republican Army, the Ulster Defense Association, or the African National Congress. Using the word seemed to be taking sides, and perhaps a little imprudent—particularly when you consider that former “terrorists” like Nelson Mandela and Menachem Begin ended their careers as winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.

  By the 1980s, terrorism was being applied to all manner of political violence. There was a flap over the word in 1989 when the New York Times editor A. M. Rosenthal attacked Christopher Hitchens for refusing to describe the fatwah against Salman Rushdie as terrorism. Hitchens had a good point. The fatwah may have been repugnant, but it was far from an act of indiscriminate violence—more like state-sponsored contract killing. But by then the word had acquired a kind of talismanic force—as if refusing to describe something as terrorism was the next thing to apologizing for it.

  By the 1990s, people were crying terrorism whenever they discerned an attempt at intimidation or disruption. Hackers who concocted computer viruses were cyberterrorists, cult leaders were psychological terrorists. Software companies accused Microsoft of terrorism in its efforts to maintain its Windows monopoly, and Microsoft accused Apple Computer of “patent terrorism” after the companies got into a dispute over intellectual property. And when photographer Spencer Tunick got thirty people to lie down naked for a picture in front of the United Nations Building in New York, a critic described the piece as “artistic terrorism at its best.”

  With that kind of freewheeling precedent, it probably shouldn’t have been surprising that the anti-terrorism bill passed by Congress defined terrorism very broadly, so that a “terrorist offense” could include anything from hijacking an airplane to injuring government property, breaking into a government computer for any reason, or hitting the secretary of agriculture with a pie. Civil libertarians are concerned that the notion of “terrorism” could become an all-purpose pretext, the way “racketeering” did after the passage of the RICO Act in the 1970s.

  That would be a linguistic misfortune, too. Granted, it’s natural to appropriate the language of violence when we want to dramatize our zeal or outrage—we make war on poverty, we skirmish over policy, and we cry bloody murder when a hotel misplaces our reservations. But when things happen that merit the full force of our outrage, a legacy of careless usage can leave us at a loss for words.

  It May Be Banal but It’s Bad News

  It may be just a sign of how sheltered my life has been, but I don’t think I’ve ever known a person who was genuinely evil. I did know an evil cat once. But that makes my point—evil isn’t something we ascribe to things in the familiar circle of our own experience. Evil has to be unfathomable, or it isn’t evil. And cats are very good at being unfathomable, whereas dogs always wear their motivations on their haunches—dogs can’t be truly evil, only mean.

  That’s why we don’t call people evil unless they seem to have no rational motive for what they do apart from a malignant pleasure in causing pain. The modern paradigm of evil is somebody like Ted Kaczynski, holed up in a Montana cabin building terror bombs and torturing his neighbor’s dogs. We don’t usually use the word for miscreants who have motives we think we can understand, like lust and avarice. Kenneth Lay and his fellow Enron brigands may be a bunch of crooks and liars, but most people wouldn’t call them evil.

  It’s odd that we should say the love of money is the root of all evil, since we tend to assume that truly evil people aren’t motivated by greed alone. But then when that verse was inserted in the King James Bible, evil had a much broader meaning. The word could refer to just about anything that was wrong, harmful, wretched, disagreeable, or merely unfortunate—the sense the word still has in phrases like “the lesser of two evils.” Or it could mean unsatisfactory or just defective—you could complain about an evil meal or evil workmanship. We may think of evil as a biblical word, but its meaning is a lot narrower for us than it is in the King James Bible itself—and narrower than traditional theologians would have understood it.

  San Francisco Chronicle, February 17, 2002

  By now, evil has become such a recondite notion that there are only a handful of modern context
s in which we use the word at all. There’s Nazi Germany, the model for evil in our time, particularly after Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Adolf Eichmann’s plodding bureaucratic mind. There are the morally tidy worlds of comic books and James Bond stories, or of gothic movies like The Exorcist and The Omen, where villainy is rendered with over-the-top campiness—I think of Richard Burton in The Exorcist II saying, “We are in the presence of ee-vill.”

  Those echoes can be hard to escape, even when someone’s trying to use the word in deadly earnest. President Bush has done everything he can to tie the word to bin Laden, to the point where he uses “the evil one” as a kind of pronoun. But if the label sticks, it’s because bin Laden is a creepy and decidedly unfathomable character who could easily have played the villain in a James Bond movie—or, for those with longer memories, in a Flash Gordon serial, where those orientalist stereotypes were first concocted for the screen.

  You can hear the same campy resonances in the phrase “axis of evil” that Bush used in his State of the Union speech. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said afterward that Bush didn’t intend any literal comparison to the Axis powers in World War II. As he put it, the allusion was “more rhetorical than historical.” That’s a bit hard to swallow, but it doesn’t really matter. No one was liable to confuse Iraq, Iran, and North Korea with the wartime Axis, not just because they’re far from allies—two of them can’t stand each other, and the third doesn’t talk to anybody at all—but because for most listeners “axis of evil” doesn’t evoke Churchillian echoes so much as a league of comic-book supervillains.

  You can see why Bush finds “evil” a convenient epithet, particularly if he’s indifferent to how it sounds in the ears of our allies. It’s a corrective for the excesses of moral relativism, it cleaves neatly between us and them, and it simplifies the business of explaining why we fight—and no less important, why they do.