A robust effort
Speak no evil, hear no evil
December 20, 2006 11 comments
If I were giving out some 2006 Unspeak Awards – which would of course be represented by a small figurine of a monkey with its hands over its mouth, sculpted out of human excrement – I have the feeling that first place would be a contest between Condoleezza Rice, for her brutal sophistry on “sustainable ceasefire”, and George W. Bush, for his rebranding of torture as being “questioned by experts”. Were there a prize for sheer shameless volume of Unspeak, Bush would of course walk it (perhaps this special prize should be a life-sized banana, sculpted out of human excrement), so it is natural that he should round off this year at unspeak.net.
As it is the season of peace and goodwill to all men, Bush has been talking about the necessity to increase the “overall size” of the US military.
The reason why is, it is an accurate reflection that this ideological war we’re in is going to last for a while, and that we’re going to need a military that’s capable of being able to sustain our efforts and to help us achieve peace.
Sure: everyone knows that an “ideological war” is always won by the biggest army. And no one can accuse Bush’s administration of not wanting to “achieve peace”. In that regard, there is certainly progress in Iraq, where one journalist asked Bush if the US was “winning”. These days, Bush appears to admire his generals on the ground primarily for their verbal ingenuity in the field of propaganda, their ability to come up with what he calls “constructs”, or made-up slogans, as when he previously bigged up John Abizaid for the “construct” of “They will follow us”. Now there is another useful “construct”:
You know, I think an interesting construct that General [Peter] Pace uses is, “We’re not winning, we’re not losing.”
It is interesting as constructs go, isn’t it? Here is another one, mysteriously not flagged as a “construct”:
And we’ve got a very robust effort – I said the other day something that, I guess, people didn’t pay that much attention to – but for October and November and the first week of December, our actions on the ground have – as a result of action on the ground, we killed or captured nearly 5,900 people.
A robust effort. Back in the day, Tommy Franks said “We don’t do body counts” in Afghanistan, meaning that progress in that war was not being measured by the amount of enemy killed. (This perfectly reasonable statement has subsequently been so systematically misquoted, by people with justified concern about civilian deaths, that the original context is all but lost to history. A shame.) Anyway, now they apparently do do body counts (of “people” – not necessarily enemies?), perhaps since that is one “metric” left that can be presented as showing military progress. They’re making a robust effort to kill more “people”, which must be the best way to “achieve peace” in the long run.
In case you were wondering, lastly, whether the midterm election results meant that no one was listening to Bush any more, he offers some reassurance:
The microphone of the president has never been louder.
That one deserves a small figurine of a monkey with its hands over its ears, sculpted out of human excrement. Happy “winterval”, readers.
Happy Christmas, Steven.
Ditto. Gus
Ditt-ditto.
If only this could be true this year:
Happy Feast of Sol Invictus.
Graham
You said:
Back in the day, Tommy Franks said “We don’t do body counts” in Afghanistan, meaning that progress in that war was not being measured by the amount of enemy killed. (This perfectly reasonable statement has subsequently been so systematically misquoted, by people with justified concern about civilian deaths, that the original context is all but lost to history. A shame.)
Thanks for usefully distinguishing TF’s original context here. But it should be remembered that the demarcation of civilian from enemy was very much at issue at the time, in a US war against an enemy without state uniform. Hence the US lawyers’ effort to creatively re-/mis-apply earlier legal references to “enemy combatants”. Secondly, your gloss on TF’s statement goes beyond what he said: what TF actually said – that estimated numbers of enemy killed were not being recorded by the American military – seems thoroughly unlikely to me, even if a total number was not being used as a private or public yardstick of progress in the war.
As it happens, I do remember the contest about enemy/civilian nomenclature in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld, quoted in Unspeak on the wedding party bombing:
As for Franks, I don’t know what his private thoughts were, but what he in fact said was not that the military wasn’t recording deaths for their own information, but they didn’t use a count of them as a public metric of progress:
Thanks for the seasonal wishes, everyone. And Merry Fistmas. I’ll be back in the new year.
Happy Ultimatemas, Steve!
Re Franks, I’m not convinced that the natural meaning of ‘do body count’ isn’t to actually count bodies (rather than either (1) report the count to the public, or a fortiori (2) use the count as a public measure of progress) – and I rather suspect his use of ‘You know’ (compare Bush and Blair’s folksy and more aggressively modally equivocal ‘Y’know’) to be a piece of Unspeak. To state ‘You know p’ is stronger than to state p. And the next line of the report juxtaposes Franks’ reported judgement of the success of a battle with another reported judgement, that ‘many enemy troops’ had been killed.
Franks’s “You know we don’t do body counts” was an expansion to the general case of what he had just said, that the assembled journalists had not heard him or anyone else give a figure. As the journalists would indeed have known, public body counts of enemy killed by the US military went rather drastically out of fashion after Vietnam. He was, I take it, chiding them for expecting him to give them one even though at that time it was well known to be against policy.
But I am wrong to think Bush’s talk a revival of body counts, since according to this Washington Post article they’ve been going on sporadically for much of the Iraq war.
Happy new year!
Fragos Townsend, assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism on CNN, talking about the failure to capture Bin Laden:
HENRY: You know, going back to September 2001, the president said, dead or alive, we’re going to get him. Still don’t have him. I know you are saying there’s successes on the war on terror, and there have been. That’s a failure.
TOWNSEND: Well, I’m not sure — it’s a success that hasn’t occurred yet. I don’t know that I view that as a failure.
in http://delong.typepad.com/
To paraphrase one of the comments, my whole life is a success that hasn’t occurred yet. Nice way to end the year. That and ‘the step towards democracy’ yesterday.