Going Nucular Page 8

  The invocation of freedom became as reflexive for the right as it had been for New Deal Democrats and those in the civil rights movement. Opponents of civil rights legislation appealed to “freedom of association,” and in 1981, Pat Robertson founded the Freedom Council to advance a Christian Conservative program. On the National Rifle Association’s Web site, freedom is three times as frequent as liberty.

  As the expanding use of freedom makes every policy and program a part of the national mission, liberty has receded from the patriotic vocabulary. If we still venerate the word now, it’s less as a rallying cry than as a stand-in for the legalistic niceties that the founders took such trouble over. That’s why the word still comes up when the conversation turns to the domestic war on terrorism, whether in the expression “civil liberties” or standing alone.

  Lately, Bush administration figures have been trying to wrest the word liberty from the critics of their homeland security measures. When a special appeals court upheld the wiretap provisions of the USA Patriot Act a few months ago, Attorney General John Ashcroft called the decision “a victory for liberty, safety, and the security of the American people.” And Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced Operation Liberty Shield, which will step up surveillance of those suspected of terrorist ties and authorize indefinite detention of asylum-seekers from certain nations.

  Even so, a lot of people still hold that liberty and safety, like guns and butter, are notions that are more appropriately opposed than conjoined. They’re mindful of Benjamin Franklin’s warning that “they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

  Right now, “Iraqi Freedom” conveys something more basic than “American freedom” suggests—it is simply emancipation from tyranny, not a choice of SUVs or an end to double taxation of dividends. The Iraqis may someday enjoy those more advanced varieties of freedom. Ultimately, they may even enjoy liberty. But that will require more time, and as we have had ample opportunity to learn, eternal vigilance.

  The Gallic Subject

  Reading through recent commentaries on European reactions to the Administration’s line on Iraq, I kept running into the adjective Gallic—“the great dismal fog of Gallic anti-Americanism”; “the duplicities of Gallic diplomacy”; “Gallic intransigence.” An op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times had French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin displaying a “Gallic insouciance” to Colin Powell’s presentation before the Security Council, and at least three other columns described the French reaction to the speech as a “Gallic shrug”—one of them, by William Safire, presciently appearing before the speech had actually been made.

  It’s an odd word, one of a handful of fanciful adjectives like Hibernian for the Irish, Caledonian for the Scots, and Teutonic for the Germans, which journalists keep handy to conjure up a familiar national stereotype. The cluster of nouns that gravitate towards Gallic suggests the mix of infatuation and exasperation that the French always evoke for American readers. Phrases like “Gallic charm” and “Gallic flair” are paired with “Gallic rudeness” and “Gallic arrogance,” and of course those inevitable “Gallic shrugs,” a phrase that turns up almost 700 times in the Nexis major newspaper database. And then there’s “Gallic logic,” a term usually preceded by “impeccable.” (The French are the only people we credit with having a national logic of their own.)

  Fresh Air Commentary, February 12, 2003

  But one way or the other, Gallic always implies the traits of character—you don’t see people talking about “Gallic aircraft carriers” or “Gallic pharmaceutical companies.” According to Edward Knox, a professor at Middlebury College who has studied the way France is reported in the American press, Gallic isn’t really a synonym for French at all—it’s more like a shorthand for “the French are at it again.”

  Gallic is just one of the vocabulary items that journalists have consecrated to the French. In press stories, the French are always “fuming” about something or other, and where other peoples say things, the French sniff them—as in ‘We were not informed of the decision,’ the minister sniffed.” In fact the adjective sniffy is another favorite here, and the French are described as snooty even more often than the English are. In the American press, the Frenchman is depicted as a character who’s guided by his nose, whereas the German is a character who’s led by it.

  Journalists have been dining out on these turns of phrase since Mark Twain’s time, but it’s striking how readily they come up when the French are proving obstinate over American policy. You don’t often hear Teutonic used in the same way to describe the Germans’ reluctance to go along. Not long ago the London Times columnist Michael Gove suggested that the Germans’ present pacifism grows out of “a historic weakness in the German character” of the same sort that led to Hitlerism—“a tendency among German elites over the past 200 years to invest the ruling ideology of the moment with the quasi-mystical quality of a political religion.” But most Americans would see that as a stretch—whatever annoyance they may feel about the German position, they don’t feel the need to connect it to Colonel Klink.

  One reason why journalists single out the French is just because they can: The French happen to be one of the few European nationalities who don’t have an American constituency to look out for their interests. What if the Italians had sided with the French and the Germans in opposing American policy on Iraq? I doubt whether commentators would be bringing up the Italian reputation for military faint-heartedness, in the way Representative Peter King did with the French a few days ago when he suggested that they could go to Baghdad “to instruct the Iraqis in how to surrender.” And you can be sure that critics wouldn’t be throwing around epithets like wops and dagos the way they have with frogs.

  True, the French have an annoying habit of vaunting their sense of cultural superiority to Americans. But the Italians, Germans, and English have exactly the same condescending attitude—though, as with the French, it’s usually mixed with a genuine affection for the engaging upstarts of the New World. If there’s a difference between the French and the others, it has more to do with an ambivalence about the cachet that French culture has in this country. Often you sense that the animus is directed less at the French than at francophiles—the people the right is quick to describe as the “Chablis and brie set.”

  It brings to mind the description that Mark Twain gave in The Innocents Abroad of the Frenchified American he encountered in Venice who’s sporting a rose in his buttonhole and calling Paris “Paree”: “Oh, it is pitiable to see him making of himself a thing that is neither male nor female, neither fish, flesh, nor fowl—a poor, miserable, hermaphrodite Frenchman!”

  You could hear that same disdain for the American francophile classes in a recent National Review piece by the conservative columnist Victor Davis Hanson. As he put it, “heartland Americans . . . far from being deprived yokels, have a clearer appreciation of the quite profound amorality in Europe than anyone in the Ivy League.” Still, it was notable that Hanson couldn’t get out of that commentary without throwing in an indignant “mon dieu!” Whenever you see the word Gallic in a story, it’s bucks to beignets it will be followed by a phrase like “tête-à-tête” or “vive la différence” or “je ne sais quoi,” just so the writers can make it clear that they aren’t deprived yokels themselves. As the critics of the French are always making a point of saying: “You can take my word for it—I’ve been there.”

  That’s why France-bashing is a perennially satisfying exercise—you can take a stick to the decadent European wussiness of your compatriots while at the same time making a show of your own cosmopolitan savoir faire. A pity the French are so prone to Gallic touchiness, or they’d see it all for the tribute it is.

  Begin the Régime

  There’s nothing so powerful as a slogan whose time has come. In 2001 there were a total of nine mentions of the phrase “regime change” in major newspapers; since January of this year there have
been more than six hundred. Yet there’s nothing new about the notion of regime change itself. I’ve found the phrase in political science articles from as far back as 1968. And regime has suggested impermanence ever since it first entered the English political lexicon just after the French Revolution. That was the mother of all regime changes, and it gave us the phrase ancien régime, or “old regime,” as a name for the form of government that was about to come to a decisive end.

  Regime first entered English as a way of referring to a country’s form of government. In that use, it needn’t be disparaging—people talk about democratic or parliamentary regimes as easily as about totalitarian regimes. But when we call a government a regime, there’s usually a sense that its hold on power is insecure or unsteady, as if you could hear the tumbrils rolling in the distance. We talk about the democratic regimes of Latin America, but not about the democratic regimes of North America or Western Europe—those we just call democracies. As best I can tell, the difference between a democratic regime and a democracy is that with the latter you don’t have to keep checking in to see who’s in charge.

  Fresh Air Commentary, October 21, 2002

  But regime has another, more recent use, where it refers to the particular people in power in a country, rather than to its form of government. That’s the sense that regime has when it’s paired with the name of a ruler or a political party, like “the Castro regime” or “the Sandinista regime.” Or people sometimes talk about “the Havana regime” or “the Beijing regime,” with the implication that the rulers just happen to be squatting in the seat of government. In those cases, regime always implies that the government is illegitimate or undemocratic. We don’t talk about the Ottawa regime or the Washington regime. And the only people who talk about the “London regime” are Irish nationalists referring to the Unionist government in Belfast, which proves the point.

  You can get a sense of just how high a government ranks on the current public enemies list just by seeing how likely the press is to describe it as a regime. When I did those counts on the names of current rulers, Saddam Hussein came in first, and second place was a tie between Castro and the Assads of Syria. Then came Gadhafi, the North Koreans, and the Iranians, with the Chinese and the Saudis trailing well behind.

  There’s a clear tendency here for the press to use regime more for governments that the U.S. has particularly antagonistic relations with. The Castro government is more than twice as likely to be called a regime as the Beijing government is, and the Syrians are six times as likely to get the label as the Saudis or Musharraf are. Still, I can see the journalistic logic to this. The label regime implies impermanence, after all, and historically, governments that have gotten on the wrong side of the United States haven’t generally proved very stable. In the past, in fact, the press has used regime most frequently for leaders that the U.S. was actively trying to topple, like the Sandinistas, Noriega, Milosevic, and the Taliban. The only difference between then and now is that the phrase “regime change” seems to make that principle a matter of official policy.

  What makes “regime change” such an inspired slogan is the way it plays on the ambiguity of regime itself. Everybody knows what the Administration’s supporters have uppermost in their minds when they talk about regime change. Ari Fleischer made that quite clear when he said that regime change in Iraq could be accomplished for the cost of a single bullet. But in the language of diplomacy, “regime change” plays a lot better than a slogan like “let’s take out this bozo”; it suggests that what the U.S. is ultimately interested in is replacing the current Iraqi system with something more benign. “Regime change”—you have the picture of a country gleaming with all the appurtenances of a modern democracy: a League of Women Voters, Sunday morning with Tim Russert, attack ads, and hanging chads.

  Well, stranger things have happened in the last few decades. But regime change can be an unpredictable business, as liberals like Condorcet and Lafayette discovered at the time of that urregime change of 1789. In the first flush of revolutionary hope, they coined the phrase le nouveau régime to describe the new democratic order that they were building. But the phrase never caught on the way ancien régime did, probably because it was quickly overtaken by events. Over the following decades, the French went through a series of dictatorships, despotisms, monarchies, communes, and short-lived republics, throwing the whole region into a turmoil that it took a hundred and fifty years to recover from. It wasn’t till eighty years after the fall of the Bastille that the French finally stopped lurching from one regime to the next and settled into a more-or-less stable democratic system that nobody was tempted to describe as a regime in the first place. It’s easier to get rid of regimes than to create a world where we don’t actually have to use the word.

  We’ll Always Have Kirkuk

  “We did not . . . defeat a brutal dictator and liberate 25 million people only to retreat before a band of thugs and assassins.” That was President Bush addressing troops in Baghdad during his holiday drop-in, picking two terms from the long list of epithets for the bad guys in Iraq.

  A CBS News report last week used five different names in the space of a couple of paragraphs. It was headed “Series of Strikes on Iraq Rebels,” and it went on to say, “U.S. forces assaulted dozens of suspected guerrilla positions, killing six alleged insurgents . . . amid a U.S. drive to intimidate the resistance.... Soldiers arrested an organizer of the fedayeen guerrillas.”

  Thugs, assassins, rebels, guerrillas, insurgents, resistance, fedayeen, not to mention bad guys—everybody has been struggling to find the right term for the enemy in Iraq. True, as long as it’s unclear who is behind the attacks, it’s probably prudent to cover all the bases. But the variation also signals a deeper problem in interpreting the story. The media may be making a valiant effort to cover the good news, but no one’s sure what story line to wrap around the bad. Just which movie are we screening here?

  Take “the resistance,” which Merriam-Webster’s defines as “an

  Los Angeles Times, November 30, 2003

  underground organization of a conquered or nearly conquered country engaging in sabotage and secret operations against occupation forces.” That seems to fit the present situation on all counts, right down to the “or nearly conquered” part. But I can understand why papers like the Los Angeles Times would demur from describing the fighters as “the resistance.” The name conjures up stirring World War II heroics à la Casablanca and Passage to Marseille, this before the French were recast as duplicitous surrender monkeys. You could see Sydney Greenstreet as Ahmad Chalabi, but Paul Bremer deserves better than Conrad Veidt.

  The other words have problems too. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “insurgent” as “one that revolts against civil authority” and “rebellion” as “open, armed and organized resistance to a constituted government.” But both words seem a little optimistic for Iraq right now, where civil authority and “constituted government” are thin on the ground. Then too, the words have awkward heroic resonances of their own: They bring to mind the good guys in The Empire Strikes Back or more disquietingly, Lawrence of Arabia. (I picture Alec Guinness saying, “The English have a great hunger for desolate places.”)

  Bush’s “thugs” and “assassins” trail inauspicious associations of their own. The assassins were originally members of a radical Ismaili sect in medieval Syria who were sent out to murder the Crusaders by a reclusive ascetic known as “the old man of the mountains,” who never was captured. (The name of the cult is derived from the hashish that its members were supposed to have chewed.) And thugs were originally the disciples of thuggee, the murderous Indian bandits that the British finally suppressed in the 1830s after a messy, decade-long campaign. The cult lives as a model for villains in Orientalist melodramas, from Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

  For a while, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was pushing “bitter-enders,” which brought to mind those Japanese holdou
ts in the caves of Saipan and Tarawa (recall Jeffrey Hunter in Hell to Eternity). But if you depict the task in Iraq as merely a mop-up operation, you have to acknowledge at some point that it isn’t going very well.

  Hence the shift to describing the situation as “a low-intensity conflict, a guerrilla war,” as Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator of the country, put it recently. Those terms put the engagements on a different footing—what were disturbing postwar security problems have now become merely minor skirmishes in an ongoing “postwar” (as a few journalists have taken to rendering the word) battle. When rockets were launched at two Baghdad hotels from donkey carts last week, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt dismissed the attacks as a “militarily insignificant” effort to grab headlines. (And so they did—a Reuter’s follow-up story was headed “Life worsens for Iraqi donkeys under U.S. suspicion,” which sounded like a line from a plot summary of The Secret of Santa Vittoria.) But it was notable that Kimmitt went on to refer to the perpetrators with the singular “he” that soldiers have used since Kipling’s day to confer a grudging respect on the enemy. “He’s an inventive, ingenious enemy.”

  So it’s understandable that some people should be looking for a new word for enemy that isn’t charged with unwanted associations. Back in June, Bremer started to refer to those resisting the coalition presence as “rejectionists,” adapting a term that has been used since the 1970s for Arab groups and governments opposed to a negotiated peace settlement with Israel. That use of the word has begun to pop up in other places—Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) used it in a recent op-ed piece.