Pro-Gaddafi forces
The pros and cons of war
March 23, 2011 14 comments
As we bomb some freedom into a foreign country again, it might be worth pointing out a quite subtle and insidious example of Unspeak in news accounts of the military attacks, whose targets are said to be “pro-Gaddafi forces”.
The people and matériel being attacked are those still operating within the chain of command at whose head is Gaddafi. No argument there. But to call them pro-Gaddafi forces introduces an extra implication: that each and every soldier is, you know, really pro-Gaddafi. Rather than being ordinary people who perhaps joined the military because it was a decent job and now find themselves on what the “international community” has deemed the wrong side and quite likely under various forms of duress not to stop fighting, ((Just as no one cared at all how many Iraqi soldiers died during the invasion of Iraq, because they were all assumed to be fighting for Saddam by choice; and as, after the invasion, “Ba’athists” were assumed to be all fascists, rather than people who just joined the party because they wanted to get jobs as teachers or civil servants.)) they must be portrayed as rabid loyalists of an unhinged dictator, on Gaddafi’s side not merely by happenstance but by ideological commitment. ((The situation of the mercenaries (or, if they were on our side, “private contractors”) bussed in from outside Libya is somewhat different, but they are presumably pro-money rather than pro-Gaddafi per se.)) They must be presented as thoroughly pro-Gaddafi. Why? So that we may kill them without too much discomfort.
“Just as no one cared at all how many Iraqi soldiers died during the invasion of Iraq, because they were all assumed to be fighting for Saddam by choice”
Not sure this is entirely true – I thought a fair amount of press coverage at the time made a strong distinction between the Iraqi army (“poor sods, likely to desert”) and the Elite Republican Guard (“fanatics who’ll fight to the death”). I assumed at the time that this was playing on WWII-era stereotypes of ordinary decent Wehrmacht doing their jobs versus evil fanatical SS men who should be shot.
They should be called ‘Libyan Government’ forces. The intention is to delegitimise and personalise the enemy. You know the sort of thing, “We’re fighting against Milosevic/Saddam/Mugabe/Gaddafi/insert name of latest Hitler, not his people”.
ps They all have ‘military machines’ whereas we have an army consisting entirely of heroes.
There is a missing element in your division between ‘orindary people’ who joined the military for the sake of a decent job and loyalists motivated by ‘ideological commitment’. There are forms of commitment that are utterly non-ideological yet utterly committed. I am thinking of the sorts of bonds that foreign journalists often call ‘tribalism’ but which might better be characterized as networks of kinship, patronage, and so on. This may account for why the conflict in Libya has taken on a regional cast of rebel east versus loyal west. The Cold War blindness that colored Northern views of Third World conflicts for so many decades still inclines us to look for ideological motivations when often there are few to none. The pro-Qaddafi fighters may simply be people with a stake in the current regime who do not want to lose it.
Oh, sure (holding off from any quibbling about “utterly non-ideological”).
Doubtless that describes some proportion of them, in which case they are still not “pro-Gaddafi” in the sense of being in favour of the man himself, are they?
Btw are there any unspeaky implications to the varying transliterations of the Colonel’s name?
From today’s New York Times, which I have just read moments ago:
Aside from the general absence of standardization, there are two reasons why Qaddafi’s name is so variably transliterated: it has two letters (qaf and dal) without Romance/Germanic equivalents, and Libyan Arabic pronounces qaf differently than most other Arabics. Qaf, the first letter, is normally transliterated as Q without U. But in Libyan Arabic qaf is apparently pronounced like a G. I use ‘Qaddafi’ perhaps because I put writing above speech.
I was too quick to hit the Send button.
Well, that depends, Steve, on what you mean by ‘being in favour of the man himself’. Is it reasonable to think that people are genuinely loyal to a powerful man who makes opportunity possible for all the members of one’s kinship group, village, or tribe? I have no trouble believing that many of Qaddafi’s ‘tribal’ loyalists geuninely love the man and don’t give a fig about rubbish like the rule of law and so on.
I just heard on the BBC the French foreign minister explain that the goal of the “coalition” is the promotion of “dialogue” in Libya. I think the use of the word “dialogue” might bear investigation in context.
No doubt, Jeff, there are some people who genuinely love Gaddafi! But the implication of “pro-Gaddafi forces” is that everyone fighting under his orders does. I think that’s rather unlikely.
As someone on Twitter pointed out, not every member of the British military would be happy being described as part of the pro-Cameron forces.
Last night, as I thought about this unspeak entry between catching up on Rebecca Black’s career and Brett Easton Ellis tweets, I wondered the very same thing and even went so far as to make a vaguely empirical effort to answer it by googling “Gaddafi”, “Qaddafi”, “Pro-Gaddafi” and “Pro-Qaddafi”, on the hypothesis that there would be a higher proportion of “Pro-Gaddafi” to “Pro-Qaddafi” than “Gaddafi” to “Qaddafi” hits, which might suggest that “Pro-Gaddafi” is intentionally alluding to the longstanding “Gaddafi” of historical memory, the one whose name did not trouble transliterators of the past, and so would unspeak the more recent, compromising Gaddafi/Qaddafi with memories of the despotic Gaddafi of yore. Sadly, results were confounded by google demanding that my search for “Qaddafi” include “Gaddafi.” Nevertheless, it is hard not to suspect that the use of “Qaddafi” insinuated a form of cultural compromise, a concession of sorts, that went hand-in-hand with a “warming” of relations, which has now been revoked.
I realise that SW is joking. Even so, I should add anecdotally that, growing up in the States, I exclusively saw Q- and Kh- spellings in the newspapers until I went to college in the 1990s. The G- spellings appear to have been more common in the British and Commonwealth countries. Only in the past fifteen or so years have the G- spellings spread to the States. Other may recall otherwise.
sw never jokes. I like your hypothesis, sw!
John #7:
Excellent. I guess bombs are our part of the dialogue? What’s their part?
Jeff, my recollection coincides with yours. There was a line from the 80s: “He spells his name using a Q without a U after it. He’s playing by rules we don’t even understand!”
Earlier I heard John Simpson talking about “pro-Gaddafi tanks”.
I never knew T-72s were so inclined!