Op-Ed

Name That War

In September 2001, the President announced that we were at war with terrorism. It was to be a conflict far longer than World War II, a titanic generational struggle more in line with the Cold War in its prospective length. It was a war that naturally deserved a name. Administration officials promptly gave it the somewhat less than sonorous, slightly tongue-twisting label of the Global War on Terrorism, which translated quickly into the inelegant acronym GWOT. That name would be used endlessly in official pronouncements, news conferences, and interviews, but never quite manage to catch on with the public. So somewhere along the line, administration officials and various neocon allies began testing out other monikers -- among them, World War IV, the Long War, and the Millennium War -- none of which ever got the slightest bit of traction.

In the meantime, the President launched his war of choice in Iraq, an invasion given the soaring name Operation Iraqi Freedom. What followed -- from the days of unrestrained looting after Baghdad fell to the present violent and chaotic moment -- has gone strangely nameless. Perhaps this was because the administration had been so certain that the invasion would shock-and-awe sufficiently to be the end of it, or perhaps because Operation Iraqi Occupation (to pick a name) ran so against the idea that we were liberating the Iraqi people. Instead, well into our third year of combat in Iraq, we find ourselves in an unnamed war -- rarely even called the Iraq War -- spiraling into nowhere. Just in the last week, 23 American soldiers died in combat; the American Air Force was let loose to bomb parts of the city of Ramadi and environs, bombings in which children died; mortars fell in Baghdad's Green Zone; and numerous Iraqis including 6 Shiite factory workers, 3 election commission officials, and 2 bodyguards of the governor of Anbar Province died in drive-by shootings or attacks of various sorts.

And yet none of this has a name. Perhaps the namelessness acted as a distancing mechanism, one of a number that, for long periods, have allowed the war to fall out of the headlines as well as American consciousness, while the dead and wounded (unless killed in staggering numbers on any given day) head for the deep middle of the newspaper. As the British in imperial days once dealt at arm's length with endless border wars in distant lands while life continued at home, so perhaps Americans responded to this nameless war once it turned sour. What makes this so strange, however, is that the particular "borderland," the global periphery, the Bush administration picked for its war lay, of course, right smack in the middle of the oil heartlands of an increasingly energy-thirsty planet. Under the circumstances, it may be worth taking a moment to consider what names might be applied to our war in Iraq and what they might reveal about our situation.

The Precipice War?

"Publicly, administration officials hailed the result but privately some officials acknowledged that the road ahead is still very difficult, especially because Sunni Arab voters appeared to have rejected the constitution by wide margins. As one official put it, every time the administration appears on the edge of a precipice, it manages to cobble together a result that allows it to move on to the next precipice."

The edge of a precipice -- an image offered to the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler by one of those anonymous officials who always seem so omnipresent in Washington, and included in a post-Iraqi-election piece headlined, For U.S., a Hard Road Is Still Ahead in Iraq. (Is that the hard road to or from the precipice?)

There have been a number of moments in the history of the American occupation of Iraq that might, in retrospect, be labeled "precipice" moments but, at the time, were hailed as "turning points" or "tipping points." These would include the killing of Saddam's sons in July 2003; the capture of Saddam in December 2003; the "turning over of sovereignty" to Iraqis in June 2004; and, of course, the "purple finger" election of January 30, 2005. The last two -- part of a larger pattern of official prediction -- were preceded by carefully choreographed administration warnings that the weeks leading up to the event would see heightened violence as the "terrorists" or insurgents tried to stop the Iraqi people from reaching the promised land of sovereignty and/or democracy. As each "landmark" arrived, it would be hailed as a tipping point in our Iraqi adventure by Bush officials in Washington as well as American commanders in Iraq -- but only, of course, until the next wave of violence arrived.

This was the Bush administration's version of Vietnam's famed "light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel." (That era also had its "tipping points" as well as its military "crossover point," the mythical moment when our forces would kill more of the enemy than they could replace.) To the tunnel-and-light metaphor, the grimly joking response at that time was, "But isn't that light the headlight of a train bearing down on us?"

What's curious and notable about Iraq's constitutional election just past is that there were the usual warnings about increased violence (even this time from a somewhat chastened President), but the normal chorus of "turning points" was missing in action. When it came to imagery, there was only a kind of embarrassed silence and that anonymous, scary view from the "precipice."

Admittedly, in a piece on the op-ed page of the right-wing Washington Times (New Iraq unfolding), you could still find the last of the faithful, one Helle Dale, announcing, "This weekend may have been the tipping point in Iraq." But hers was a lonely tipping-point vigil. Elsewhere, when such images cropped up -- as in a Steven Komarow USA Today piece headlined Vote is critical turning point for Iraq, the image had morphed into something quite different. As Komarow put it: "But at stake are issues that could determine whether Iraq's violence and political instability will worsen or whether the country moves closer to a stable democracy." We weren't, it seems, at a tipping point, but at a previously unmentioned fork in the road. Unfortunately, Fork-in-the-Road War doesn't have much of a ring to it.

So, to tipping points, turning points, or even -- another image often wielded by administration officials -- that "corner" we were just about to turn, it's evidently time to bid adieu, sayonara, so long, bud. Perhaps we've... gulp... come to an actual American turning point in how we think about our war in Iraq? Just as all the explanations for the war -- WMDs, Sadddam's 9/11 links, liberating the Iraqis from tyranny -- have peeled away, so, it seems, has a whole arsenal of hopeful images and metaphors. They've gone onto the trash heap of historic imagery along with, for instance, the Iraqi "face" that American officials always were talking about putting on occupied Iraq, or that bicycle we were regularly going to mount the Iraqi kid on, after which we would, sooner or later, kick off those training wheels and let him take a toodle around the... dare I say it... corner?

For the last couple of years, sprayed by machine-gun bursts of hopeful administration propaganda as well as fear-inducing, color-coded warnings of terror attacks to come (all faithfully reproduced in our press and on TV), it was as if we were living inside the Bush equivalent of one of those Cold War magazines like Soviet Life produced by the other side. Now that the sheen is off and the conflict in Iraq seems unending, however, all we're left with (other than a hangover) is a nameless war and, perhaps, a creeping sense of shame.

But before we put "tipping point" to metaphorical sleep, it turns out there still is one party ready to use it in the way it should be used. Check out this headline hailing the recent election: Referendum marks turning point in Iraqi history. As it happens, that comes hot off the presses of the Tehran Times.

Actually, in a piece (Administration's Tone Signals a Longer, Broader Iraq Conflict) in the New York Times this week, David Sanger suggested part of the underlying problem. The Bush administration has just begun to admit to itself that creating its version of democracy in Iraq -- think Florida, 2000 -- has had no positive effect on the insurgency, which only grew as those turning points of democracy came and went. Now, but one "landmark" remains on the administration's calendar, the elections in December for a new parliament. This, it seems, gave another of those unnamed Washington officials the willies. He or she then whispered in Sanger's ear. "The real test may come after parliamentary elections, which, if the constitution is found to have passed this weekend, are scheduled for mid-December. After that time, a senior administration official noted with some dread in his voice, ‘there are no more democratic landmarks for us to point to - that's when we learn whether the Iraqi state can stay together.'"

So imagine, then, all those anonymous officials standing at that precipice and staring into what could certainly be labeled the Abyss War.