Posts in October, 2006
On constructs and lipsticked pigs
October 27, 2006 6 comments
The transcript of President George W. Bush’s interview with sympathetic print columnists is full of piquant images.
My strategy, from day one, was to go on the offense, stay on the offense, and keep the pressure on them until we are able to bring as many to justice as possible. They morph. You know, they kind of – there is al Qaeda central, there is al Qaeda look-alikes, there is al Qaeda want-to-bes. They’re dangerous. Some are more dangerous than others. And we have got special teams and special operating teams, as well as intelligence teams, pressuring them a lot.
They morph. These guys are so dangerous they don’t even keep a recognisably humanoid shape. Like the T-2000 robot, made out of liquid metal. Faced with such a foe, you need not just special teams but special operating teams, as well as experts, professionals and so forth. You also need one of the really great thinkers.
Abizaid, who I think is one of the really great thinkers, John Abizaid – I don’t know if you’ve ever had a chance to talk to him, he’s a smart guy – he came up with this construct: If we leave, they will follow us here.
He came up with this construct. There I was, trying to take “they will follow us” seriously, and now Bush admits that’s it’s just a construct – that Abizaid just made it up. I’m completely wrongfooted. It’s very clever: this kind of stuff is going to really confuse the enemy. It’s like putting mascara on a – what was that phrase again?
Don’t write me down as hopelessly naive and trying to always put lipstick on the pig, but I understand there’s got to be – you know, life is moving. People are living their lives, schools are opening. And it – and yet, this is a war that you don’t measure platoons storming hills. You measure – evidently, the measurement is violence. Well, if the absence of violence is victory, no one will ever win, because all that means is you’ve empowered a bunch of suiciders and thugs to kill.
Ah yes. Putting lipstick on the pig. But what does the tender filial scene of little George applying Barbara Bush’s makeup for her every morning have to do with the war in Iraq? Never mind, let’s concentrate on the fact that the absence of violence can’t be victory, because “all that means” is, er, that there’s a lot of violence around. Or something. But this is to get bogged down in logic. The assembled columnists tried their best to help.
Q: I want to go on the air tonight, I want some good news. I need some good news, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I do, too.
Q: I really do.
THE PRESIDENT: You’re talking to Noah about the flood. I do, too.
Talking to Noah about the flood. Fascinating. Like Noah, Bush has received a secret message from God about the coming global inundation. I wonder who gets a place on the Ark? The neocons went in two by two . . . We may rest easy knowing that the offspring of Cheney and Rice will repopulate the Earth when the waters recede. In these last days, meanwhile, please meditate on the sovereignty of the Iraqi government.
They were asking me today, put out benchmarks. Well, it’s a sovereign government. You just don’t put out benchmarks. You work with the sovereign government to develop a way forward that’s got enough pressure on them to move, but at the same time, they’re comfortable with. Look, if we wanted to, we could put so much pressure on the Maliki government to topple it. What good would that do? We could put so many demands on them, it might satisfy people in the short-term, but it would defeat the purpose for victory in Iraq.
Let’s get this straight. It’s a sovereign government, but never forget that we could bring it down in a moment “if we wanted to”. See? But enough of this talk of war: what really matters in an election is tax cuts.
And I believe that when it gets down to it, money in people’s pockets are going to matter. I really do. Immigration is an issue. I don’t hear it being discussed much out there. Of course, generally, I’m doing all the discussing.
People really are letting the President down in this time of need. There he is, doing all the discussing, and everyone else is staying silent. Or else they are not speaking loudly enough to drown out the sound of his own voice. The rains are coming. Won’t someone help him out?
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What the ‘professionals’ need
October 26, 2006 14 comments
In his press conference on Iraq yesterday, President George W. Bush emphasised the danger posed by “the enemy”:
These are lethal, cold-blooded killers. And we must do everything we can to protect the American people, including questioning detainees or listening to their phone calls from outside the country to inside the country. In other words, as you know, there was some recent votes on that issue. And the Democrats voted against giving our professionals the tools necessary to protect the American people.
Our professionals, also known as experts, are, as we have seen, those who conduct sessions of the most sensitive questioning, or torture. An interesting addition here is the concept of the tools. Doubtless we are not meant to think of anything so crude as power-drills or electric-shock devices. Perhaps an inclined table for the purposes of forced partial drowning is all that is needed. But there is a further implication of calling authorizations of torture or wiretapping of US citizens the tools: it shunts them out of the realm of moral discourse. Tools are simply functional objects to do one job or another. The question of what tool to use in most situations is not an ethical question but a technological one. Let the carpenter decide between bradawl and screwdriver: who are we to interfere with his craftsman’s nous?
Thus, to consider torture a “tool necessary to protect the American people” reflects a general view, particularly noticeable in Donald Rumsfeld’s command of the Pentagon (his geeky obsession with gadgets and “special forces”), that there are no ethical questions, only technological ones. Were it not an implicit violation of Godwin’s law, I might mention that such an attitude has historically been characteristic of totalitarian government. On this reading, however, Bush’s recent legislation prompts an interesting question. If he is blaming the tools that were already legal for not being sufficient for the job, does that make him a bad workman?
Bush was also asked about permanent bases in Iraq:
Any decisions about permanency in Iraq will be made by the Iraqi government. And, frankly, it’s not in much of a position to be thinking about what the world’s going to look like five or 10 years from now. They are working to make sure that we succeed in the short term. And they need our help. And that’s where our focus is. But remember, when you’re talking about bases and troops, we’re dealing with a sovereign government. Now, we entered into an agreement with the Karzai government. They weren’t called permanent bases, but they were called arrangements that will help this government understand that there will be a U.S. presence so long as they want them there.
As a euphemism for permanent bases, “arrangements that will help this government understand that there will be a U.S. presence so long as they want them there” needs a little work.
14 comments
Scientology as a ‘force for good’
October 24, 2006 3 comments
“Spiritual wealth” is an interesting phrase, usually invoked in contrast to filthy lucre – and yet churches throughout history have notoriously been rather interested in base monetary wealth as well as its “spiritual” cousin. Indeed, as in the old Catholic practice of selling indulgences, “spiritual wealth” is often promised exactly in exchange for ready coin. What is a senior London policeman doing exhorting the contribution to the “spiritual wealth of society” made by Scientologists? More in my post over at Comment Is Free.
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On our ‘cosmic homelessness’
October 21, 2006 16 comments
My review in today’s Guardian is reproduced below. The point about the “meaning” of the universe in the last paragraph has doubtless been made more elegantly by greater minds in the past. More relevant to thinking about certain kinds of Unspeak might be the authors’ concept of “scale confusion” or “scale chauvinism” . . .
• The View From the Centre of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos
by Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams
Let’s try an experiment. Take a piece of chalk and draw a circle around yourself on the ground. Think of something else for a minute. Now look down. You’re in the middle of a circle! Doesn’t that make you feel special?
This is the recommended therapy for people suffering from a kind of transgalactic ennui. Blame scientists. Ever since they showed that the Earth goes round the sun and not vice versa, humans’ place in the universe has seemed increasingly marginal. As the cosmologist Carl Sagan put it: “We live on a hunk of rock and metal that orbits a humdrum star in the obscure outskirts of an ordinary galaxy comprised of 400 billion stars in a universe of some hundred billion galaxies …” How insignificant we are, on the vast scales of space.
Such is the received wisdom and, like all received wisdom, it is worth challenging. Husband-and-wife team Primack, an astrophysicist, and Abrams, a philosopher of science, understand our pain. They know the temptation of what they call “the existential alternative”, as exemplified by Sagan. They give the feeling a rather beautiful name: “cosmic homelessness”. And they promise to prove, using the latest cosmological discoveries, that the idea is wrong. Science itself, they say, demonstrates that we are actually central to the universe . . .
continued »
16 comments
‘Melanie Phillips’ vs the veil
October 20, 2006 29 comments
I know I shouldn’t, but I’ve been reading more of the blog by the satirical personage dubbed “Melanie Phillips”. One post quotes a Muslim writing with pride about how the English city of Oxford has several mosques and halal restaurants, and many Muslim scholars wandering the quads of the university. “Melanie” responds:
Thus the triumphalism of someone who understands better than the dhimmi dummies of Oxford university the magnitude of the cultural pass they have so recklessly sold.
I am having trouble reading this as saying anything other than that the University of Oxford should not hire Muslim academics. If so, it is lamentably crude as comic writing. But another post is more subtle. In this one, “Melanie” relates how, on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze, “she” and the other panellists interviewed a woman “who wore the niqab or full-face veil”:
Talking to her brought something else home to me: the radical imbalance of power in the encounter, due to the fact that while she could see my face I could not see hers.
There are many interesting facets to this. The first is that, of course, a niqab is not exactly a “full-face veil”, because it does not cover the eyes, useful to see out of, as well as to communicate with. To call it a “full-face veil” nonetheless is cleverly to invoke an image of scarily featureless aliens. Second, the idea that being able to see someone’s whole face, not just the eyes (already Unspoken by “full-face veil”) is a source of “power” is an interesting one. Where might this power lie? I am wholly confident that even for “Melanie Phillips”, the source of frustration cannot be that there is insufficient skin on display to be able to tell at once if one is talking to a Caucasian or someone of browner complexion. Leaving that delicate question unanswered, we notice thirdly how interesting it is that “Melanie Phillips” does not identify the “radical imbalance of power” as working in exactly the opposite direction to the one claimed. You might suppose that the real “radical imbalance of power” is that between the ordinary woman and the handsomely remunerated newspaper and radio “personality” (or rather, “her” anonymous puppeteer) who is aggressively interrogating the ordinary woman for the public’s broadcast edutainment.
Lastly, “Melanie Phillips” does not identify the “radical imbalance of power” that most grieves me personally. This imbalance consists in the fact that, when I accidentally tune in to The Moral Maze, I can hear “Melanie Phillips” talking, but she cannot hear me shouting: “Shut the fuck up, you depressingly plausible impersonation of a smarmy, vicious bigot!” And so I am reduced to writing a blog post instead.
29 comments
Preparing a ‘clearance operation’
October 19, 2006 2 comments
From Patrick Cockburn’s superb (apart from the subtitle) The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq:
“During preparatory operations in the November 2004 Fallujah clearance operation, on one night over forty 155mm artillery rounds were fired into a small sector of the city,” recalled Brigadier Aylwin-Foster, the perceptive British commander serving with the US forces in Baghdad. “Most armies would consider this bombardment a significant event. Yet it did not feature on the next morning’s update to the 4-Star Force Commander: the local commander considered it to be a minor application of combat power.”
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What to call legalized torture
October 18, 2006 12 comments
Now that the Military Commissions Act – which authorizes the torture by US officials of prisoners so long as it does not result in serious “bodily injury” or non-transitory mental harm – has passed into law, there is a new standard euphemism for what it allows. It is tough. A BBC Radio news report yesterday referred fastidiously to “tough interrogation”. Newspapers are also referring to “tough interrogation” or “tough rules” or “tough methods” or “tough techniques”. As compared to previous talk of rough interrogation, this is a rhetorical refinement. It is particularly interesting for the possibility of a useful semantic leakage of the adjective. The usage “tough interrogation”, especially, may come to evoke an interrogation performed by tough men. And so the emphasis is handily switched from the suffering of those being tortured, about which it is uncomfortable to think too closely, to the moral and physical robustness of those doing the torturing. American torturers would thus be pictured as macho, square-jawed, taciturn heroes, fair-minded but dedicated to defending their country: tough. And in these times, who can doubt that toughness is a virtue? As Billy Ocean once sang, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Do you have some bleeding-heart, weaselly objections to such Wild West moral clarity? Tough.
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Hitchens and ‘moral idiocy’
October 17, 2006 55 comments
Christopher Hitchens’s response to the Lancet study is ingenious. First he smears it as fantasy – because the Lancet apparently has “a reputation for conjuring bloodbaths”. But then, “for the sake of argument”, he assumes that the figures are correct. What then?
Indeed, if you look more closely, you will see that less than one-third of the surplus deaths are attributed, even by this study, to “Allied” military action. Grant if you wish that this figure is likely to be more exact, since at least the coalition fights in uniform and issues regular statistics.
Where are the “regular statistics” issued by the splendidly uniformed “coalition” on how many people they kill? Oh, that’s right, there aren’t any. The reassuring “less than one-third” figure is actually 31%. This is not, as Hitchens thinks, the proportion of the total “excess” or “surplus” deaths post-invasion attributable to the “coalition”, but specifically the proportion of violent deaths. It amounts to 186,318 people. Hitchens continues with a quibble born of ignorance:
We are told that 24 percent of the violent deaths were caused by “other” actors, and 45 percent of them by “unknown” ones. If there is any method of distinguishing between the “other” and the “unknown,” we are not told of it.
Uh, yes we are. The problem appears to be that Hitchens has only bothered to read the Guardian story on the report to which he links, and not the report itself. “Other” in the “cause of violent death” column at Table 4 (p 5) means deaths attributed to forces other than the “coalition”: in other words, to insurgent and factional violence. “Unknown”, meanwhile, means just what it says – that the study cannot with confidence attribute those deaths to one or other force: “the responsible party was not known, or the households were hesitant to specifically identify them” (p 5). But anyway, even if the “coalition” are killing people, one can conduct a hand-waving argument that they are killing the right people:
Make the assumption that some percentage of those killed by the coalition are the sort of people who have been blowing up mosques, beheading captives on video, detonating rush-hour car bombs, destroying pipelines, murdering aid workers, bombing the headquarters of the United Nations, and inciting ethnic and sectarian warfare. Make the allowance for the number of bystanders and innocents who lost their lives in the combat against these fanatics (one or two, alas, in the single case of the precision bombing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, just to take one instance). But who is to say how many people were saved from being murdered by the fact that the murderers were killed first?
Who is to say, indeed? Not Hitchens: he is merely pulling this stuff out of thin air. To a detailed statistical study that explains its methodology and gives confidence intervals for its estimates, Hitchens’s response is to appeal to “some percentage”. Look, some percentage of the people we are killing are themselves murderers. That is no doubt true. But what percentage does Hitchens suppose it to be? Does it make a particular difference, for instance, if some percentage is less than half, or more than half? Even if some percentage were, for instance, an impressively accurate 75%, that would leave 25%, or 46,580 civilians killed by US-led forces. Would that number be okay?
Hitchens no doubt intuits that even a favourable figure for some percentage would work out, after some minimal arithmetic, at a horrific total of blameless Iraqis killed by the “coalition”. That is why he leaves it so usefully vague. The appeal to some percentage is affectedly casual, even bored, displaying an aristocratic impatience with mere bean-counting, a confidence that a righteous roll-call of horrors inflicted by the insurgents will trump the findings of people who have been to Iraq and conducted a door-to-door survey of death. Some percentage further Unspeaks the leftover percentage of Iraqi civilians killed by the “coalition”, denies that there is any point in even coming to an estimate of how many they are. Why bother counting them? Just imagine that even more would have been killed by the “murderers” if, er, we hadn’t already killed them ourselves. Concentrate your mind on the fact that some percentage of the people we are killing are villains. After some further meditation on the fact that the “coalition” wears uniforms and the fiction that it issues regular statistics on how many civilians it kills, you may come to conclude that the percentage in question is as close to 100% – give or take “one or two, alas” – as makes no difference.
But the story is even happier than that:
But the “tit for tat” confessional killings were and are a deliberate tactic of the insurgency and now threaten to spread into mass reprisals on both sides, while all the effort of the coalition is devoted to negotiating a compromise between the country’s factions. It is simple moral idiocy to fail to distinguish between these phenomena.
From a vague protestation that we are killing the right people, Hitchens moves miraculously to a claim that, anyway, we aren’t killing anyone at all. All the effort of the “coalition”, you see, is “devoted to negotiating a compromise”. No doubt because of my “moral idiocy”, I have contrived to miss the recent statistics issued by the uniformed “coalition” showing that all airstrikes, bombing and shooting have ceased, to be replaced by diplomatic negotiations throughout the country. Or perhaps “negotiating a compromise” is a delicious new form of Unspeak for “killing people”. Or maybe some percentage of Hitchens’s article is disingenuous garbage.
55 comments
Science – what is it good for?
October 16, 2006
I have a post up at Comment is Free today, where I hope occasionally to write commenty things that are not strictly Unspeak-related. This one is in reply to Simon Jenkins’s criticism of the “science campaign” in British education. (Not the other sort of science campaign, that involves building nukes.) There is, though, some gratuitous bashing of global-warming denialists and “intelligent design” proponents near the end, so it’s not entirely off-topic.
The BBC on Unspeak in Israel/Palestine
October 14, 2006 13 comments
The BBC has a new style guide advising its journalists on the use of “key terms” when reporting on Israel/Palestine. (Thanks to WIIIAI.) Its intentions, as explained by Middle East bureaux editor Simon Wilson, are honourable – as I would put it, to avoid Unspeak. The guide makes a number of sensible recommendations: for example, to avoid the phrase “cycle of violence”, which “does nothing to explain any of the underlying causes of the conflict and may indeed obscure them”. Quite so: “cycle of violence” is rhetorical handwashing, often underpinned by the racist connotations that inform concepts of “ancient hatreds” and so on. (They’re just a bunch of savages locked in an interminable blood-feud, what are you gonna do?) But of course it’s not all so easy. Here is what the guide says about one of the most contested names, the “barrier”:
The BBC uses the terms “barrier”, “separation barrier” or “West Bank barrier” as acceptable generic descriptions to avoid the political connotations of “security fence” (preferred by the Israeli government) or “apartheid wall” (preferred by the Palestinians).
As per the long discussion of this terminology in Chapter 4 of Unspeak, however, the BBC’s three “acceptable generic descriptions” do not themselves quite avoid “political connotations” either. “Separation barrier” either is a tautology or is using “separation” as Unspeak for “enclosure”. Even the term “barrier”, used on its own or in conjunction with “West Bank”, evokes protection from a threat, as in the Thames flood barrier, or the blood-brain barrier, and thus endorses one official motivation at the expense of others. This is one of those cases (of which there are many) in which the dream of perfectly neutral, transparent terminology appears to be forlorn, but at least they are making an effort. Stranger, though, is what the BBC has to say about “outposts”:
It is generally advisable not to refer to “illegal” outposts (they are all illegal and if you call one illegal some may assume that others are not).
Curious logic. If you refuse to call any “outpost” illegal, surely some may assume that they’re all legal?
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