War. What Is It Good For?

War. What is it good for?

Well, it makes a good metaphor to deploy if you want to maintain even slight support for your foreign policy.

Plenty of people have noted that the “war on terror” is a metaphor that the Bush administration wants to take literally. What’s even more interesting to me, though, is the way the conflict in Iraq is framed (to use George Lakoff’s term) using the metaphor of “war.”

I’ve mentioned previously that what’s going on in Iraq is not so much a war as a disastrous occupation. But “war” is the word that is used to describe it, not only by the administration, but by people across the board, including those adamantly opposed to Bush’s Iraq policy.

From a rhetorical point of view, the important thing is to think about what using that term means. It’s not an arbitrary word choice—it affects how we think about what’s going on.

Tabling for the moment whether what’s happening in Iraq meets the dictionary definition of “war,” and if so, whether the U.S. forces are actually fighting this war or are caught in the middle of it, let’s think about what the term “war” connotes.

First, obviously, is the notion of winners and losers. The administration, and a surprising number of its critics, talk about withdrawal from Iraq as “losing the war.” We will be “defeated” by the “enemy.”

As long as withdrawal is understood within this frame, it will be a hard policy to sell to the American people, despite the overwhelming disapproval of Bush’s policies and the desire to bring the troops home. Given our national mythos as “winners,” Americans will have a hard time stomaching something that is labeled as defeat in a war. There are even those who refuse to admit that the Vietnam War was “lost” (I’m flashing on Kevin Kline’s character in A Fish Called Wanda getting apoplectic when John Cleese brings up the subject).

In our collective national mythology, my sense is that “war” as a concept is intertwined with World War II—the war that made the U.S. a superpower; that was fought by the “greatest generation,” that defeated the unabashed evils of fascism and genocidal racism. It was the “good” war.

It is the war that, more than any other, defines us as global “winners.”

When our attitudes about war are so shaped by triumphalism, total victory of total evil, and ticker tape parades, it’s understandable that once a situation is couched in terms of war, anything less than that disturbs us. It runs counter to our collective narrative of ourselves—our self image as a nation.

The Bush administration has won a rhetorical victory by getting everyone—politicians, the press, the activists—to use “war” as the frame through which we see Iraq. It makes any efforts to question or end the administration’s policies doubly difficult.

The administration’s ability to win such a victory (and the willingness of so many to acquiesce to it) is surprising if only because the situation on the ground doesn’t have much in common with what “war” means. The “insurgency” (another term that’s rhetorically effective given the way it creates a falsely monolithic “enemy”) is a collection of groups that spend at least as much time killing one another as they do Americans. In fact, most of the losses in the Iraq war are Iraqis. It’s a low grade civil war in which U.S. troops are ineffectual peacemakers.

Unlike Vietnam or Korea, in which the U.S. had a firm alliance with one side in a civil war against another, we truly don’t have a dog in the Iraq fight. We have occupied the country, and that occupation—for any number of reasons—has allowed conflict to erupt among groups within Iraq. That conflict might be a war, but it’s not a war in which we are on one side or the other.

It’s probably too late to pull this off, but what those who want change in our Iraq policy should do is point out the obvious: that to the extent the U.S. was in a “war” in Iraq, it ended in the spring of 2003, just weeks after it started. We won. The multitude of failures have been post-war. They’re failures of occupation, not of war. Rather than talk about the war “already being lost,” critics of the administration should deny the validity of the president’s framing and replace it with a vocabulary of bureaucratic failure rather than military failure.

This might seem like splitting hairs, but I’d argue that not only would such a change in terminology be objectively more accurate, but it would open up more possibilities for creating a consensus for getting the hell out of there. Better to have screwed up an occupation than to have “lost” a “war.”

But as long as the language of war is in vogue among even those who oppose the administration’s Iraq policies, I fear we’ve rhetorically locked ourselves into a failure we won’t allow ourselves to walk away from.