Flashback, September 2001: Bush Urges ‘War on Terror’)

Addressing a joint session of Congress a little over a week after the United States was attacked by al Qaeda terrorists, President George W. Bush stated that the nation was now engaged in a “war on terror” that would involve conventional military action, covert intelligence operations, and disruption of terrorist financing.

The phrase and the commentary surrounding it illustrated both the highly unusual, even unprecedented, nature of the war and the elastic nature of the U.S. government response. Both of these factors explain why it has been impossible to bring the resulting military action to a definitive conclusion.

First, notice what President Bush’s message was not: a request that Congress declare war, even though “war on terror” may have been the most enduring linguistic coinage from the address. Congress has not fulfilled this constitutional duty since WWII. In a way, both the executive and legislative branches get what they want from this state of affairs: a President gets to act with maximum freedom to act, while Congress possesses plausible deniability if a war to which it has explicitly acquiesced goes awry.

Early on, U.S. intelligence determined that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were carried out by al-Qaeda, a terrorist network with training camps in Afghanistan. But unlike, say, WWI and WWII, where the United States deemed that foreign governments were directly involved in infringing on American sovereignty, the U.S. sought to get at the perpetrators of 9/11 initially by confronting a party indirectly responsible: the Taliban regime that allowed al-Qaeda to flourish within its borders. 

The nomenclature of a war how it will be prosecuted and, decades later, how it will be perceived. The conflict that raged for four years after the firing on Fort Sumter was known, particularly among Northerners, as the “War of the Rebellion.” (Its primary documents are known as The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, or the “O.R.” for short among historians.)   

As an “Opinionator” blog post in The New York Times’ by Chandra Manning and Adam Rothman a few years ago noted, calling secession a “rebellion” enabled the federal government to invoke the Constitution’s Article I, Section 8 authority granted to “suppress Insurrections,” and Article I, Section 9 to suspend the writ of habeas corpus for the same contingency.

It was only after 1881, when former Confederate President Jefferson Davis began to refer to it as the “Civil War,” that Union advocates adopted it. (Manning and Rothman note that the new term was more conciliatory than “War of the Rebellion,” but there may have been another reason why it caught on: it was shorter. That convenience probably led them to resist southern sympathizers’ attempt at a more nakedly ideological phrase for the conflict: “The War Between the States.”)

The “War on Terror” (soon known as the “Global War on Terror,” or the bureaucratic shorthand GWOT) was seemingly designed both to describe the asymetric warfare of the enemy and to seize the moral high ground claimed by victims. But it also opened the doors to a situation difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. (No sooner would the resources of al-Qaeda be dramatically reduced, for instance, than ISIS rose from its ashes.)

At the same time, a broader name for the war allowed the Bush administration to push to the limit of public opinion. Within three days of 9/11, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and even Bush himself were requesting reports on possible Iraqi involvement with the attacks—and expressing annoyance when intelligence agencies did not turn up credible evidence of this. (See, for instance, this account of the preparations for the Iraq war with Iraq by Joyce Battle, senior analyst for the National Security Archive at George Washington University.)

Had Bush delivered a sharply focused message after 9/11, he could have confined military and political objectives to the demands he made on the Taliban in Afghanistan (e.g., “Deliver to United States authorities all of the leaders of Al Qaeda who hide in your land”). Those demands might have involved time to bring to a successful conclusion, even bloodshed. But they would not have required a constant change in priorities with new countries and organizations in this regional drama.

Bush thrust these new actors to the forefront only four months later in his next State of the Union address. Not without some controversy, he denounced an “Axis of Evil” of state-sponsored terrorism: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the mullahs of Iran, and one of the last surviving Communist regimes, North Korea. 

Linguistic purists might have noted that the original Axis powers that inflicted World War II on the world were already dictatorial, so the “Axis of Evil” was a redundant phrase and the trio might have been better called “the New Axis.”

But the Bush Administration missed an even larger point: in the run-up to WWII, Germany, Italy and Germany were formally bound by treaty, facilitating the military actions of each around the globe. In contrast, 21^st-century Iraq, Iran and North Korea might have been hostile to the U.S., but had shown no inclination to cooperate militarily. (In fact, tensions between Iraq and Iran remained high, only a dozen years after a drawn-out, bloody war between the two.)

Moreover, none of the three could be shown to have aided al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. The “Axis of Evil,” then, was an advertising slogan more than an actual structure of international affairs. If you want to be charitable, you could call it a metaphor.

But the use of metaphor was a huge part of the problem with the term “the war on terror” itself, which was no more of a metaphor than WWI, WWII, or any other 20^th-century American war. Thousands of service personnel are not put in harm’s way for a “metaphor.”

There have been instances when “war” has been used, correctly, as a metaphor: Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” and a phrase that Jimmy Carter borrowed from philosopher William James to describe his energy conservation program: “the moral equivalent of war.” If any of these “campaigns” resemble the war on terror, however, it lies in the meager results achieved despite immense Presidential ambitions and government expenditures.

The War on Terror not only defined Bush’s presidency, but limited the options, linguistic and otherwise, of his successor. In a 2010 article in The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder pointed to a new initiative of the Obama Administration, intended to replace the War on Terror: Countering Violent Extremism (CVE).   

The new term, meant to promote the use of “soft power” in stemming terrorism, displays none of the imagination of its predecessor, however. It reeks of the bloodless bureaucrat, someone ready to talk an issue to death rather than to solve it. It’s death by linguistic rather than military drone.

 

Gary Johnson: The High—and Low—Times of a Presidential Candidate

Last week, on MSNBC, Gary Johnson flunked what may have been his most prominent appearance in this campaign to date. A simple question on the Syrian civil war from commentator Mike Barnicle—“What would you do, if elected, about Aleppo?”— elicited the following stunned, and stunning, response from the Libertarian Party candidate: “And what is Aleppo?”

That gaffe makes Johnson the latest victim of what I call the “Bush-Perry Syndrome.” This ailment, which invariably leaves the victim abashed, even stricken, occurs when a candidate’s inability to grasp either the policies or people he’ll encounter in the Oval Office occurs in a particularly high-profile setting. The syndrome is named for two Texas governors who, despite their common wilting under blinding scrutiny, do not seem to have had much affection for each other.

In November 1999, facing an interrogator from a Boston TV station, George W. Bush came up with only one of four international statesmen recently in the news—a pop quiz that his father could have aced. 

Fortunately, Bush had a vast retinue of retainers and other supporters from his father’s days as a politician—along with a reputation of his own that was not yet sullied by a mismanaged war—which allowed him to survive, though it was a portent of the inattention to detail that would plague him in the Oval Office.

Rick Perry, however, was not as lucky in the 2012 primaries. He had just boasted of his tax plan when he segued into how he’d reduce the number of regulations and the size of government by eliminating three government agencies: Commerce, Education, and—oh, what was the third one? The best he could come up with after a minute, in front of a moderator, his opponents in that November 2011 debate, and an audience that would make his flub go viral before the world, was “Oops!”

These were, according to a Washington Post story last September, moments that would “forever define his brief time as a national figure”—effectively ending not only Perry’s first campaign for the Presidency, but fatally overshadowing his second one, four years later.

Which brings us back to Johnson, who—at least till last week—was being eyed by a not-inconsiderable part of the electorate as a viable alternative to the two wildly polarizing Republican and Democratic candidates. Barnicle couldn’t hide his astonishment over Johnson’s blank response: “You’re kidding, right?” In short order, through the commentator and a host of news articles, Johnson was reminded (or, some might be less charitable in thinking, informed) that, as Syria’s largest city, Aleppo had become the epicenter of that sad country’s ferocious free-for-all.

Others might believe that Johnson might have gotten around to learning about its sad plight, except that, instead of reading Steven Coll’s signed commentary in The New Yorker about the crisis, the former governor of New Mexico had been reading (and maybe re-reading) in the same magazine something that is always a politician’s favorite subject: an article about himself.

The Ryan Lizza article, in the July 25 issue, depicted Johnson as an amiable politico willing to go off the Republican reservation when it came to issues such as abortion, gay rights, and immigration. 

Oh, yes, and willing to make an eyebrow-raising concession to political norms: If elected President, stated this recent C.E.O. of the marijuana-branding company Cannabis Sativa, Inc., a marijuana-branding company, “I will not indulge in anything. I don’t think you want somebody answering the phone at two o’clock in the morning—that red phone—drunk, either.” He last ingested a pot edible a few months ago, he said.

For Johnson, his new-found abstinence also robbed him of the only plausible explanation besides lack of intellectual substance for why he had royally messed up his answer to Barnicle’s question: i.e., that he was too high to grasp it.

“Candor” is a politician’s word for nothing left to lose. At this point in the campaign, Johnson’s surge in the polls resembled nothing so much as the New York Yankees after getting rid of much of their high-priced older talent at the end of July: the younger talent brought aboard, with no expectations on their shoulders, promptly reeled off a string of victories until some tough losses brought them back to earth again.

With yesterday’s news that Johnson’s sub-15% share of polls has led to his exclusion from the first Presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the Libertarian standard-bearer may rue what might have been but for his response to Barnicle. At the same time, his new-found freedom to speak could make him an even more credible alternative to the Democrat and Republican Presidential nominees among voters who want to register their chagrin with current politics without doing something completely insane.

After all, nuttier things have already happened in this election—just about every day.

Quote of the Day (Gary Silverman, on Screen and Political Sequels)

“A citizenry that would want to sit through Fast and Furious 7… could probably handle a Clinton Administration 3 or a Bush Administration 4. For all we know, it might even look forward to a star turn by Hillary’s daughter, Chelsea, or Jeb’s son, George P. They are both waiting in the political wings, you know, polishing their acts.”—Gary Silverman, “Hollywood Learns Originality Does Not Pay,” Financial Times, May 30-31, 2015

TV Quote of the Day (‘SNL,’ With the Possible Origins of Jeb Bush’s ‘Hispanic’ Status)

(In their third debate, monitored by Jim Lehrer, Al Gore and George W. Bush take questions at a town hall forum. The GOP candidate’s father, former President George W. Bush, has already tried unsuccessfully to inject himself into the contest, but he remains resourceful.)

Debate Moderator Jim Lehrer (played by Chris Parnell): “Next, a question for Governor Bush, from Mr. Jorge H.W.B.”

Former President George Bush (played by Dana Carvey): [now reappearing, disguised in Mexican garb with his Secret Service Agents] “Well, as an undecided Latino voter - mi English unbiquito here - but I'd like to ask Governor Bush here.” [Turning to his son, Gov. George W. Bush, played by Will Farrell.] “Didn't that last question seem a little biased? A little skewed? Not totally on the level? That last fellow - possible shill...possible Democratic operative over there…”

Lehrer (annoyed): “President Bush, please!!!”

George Bush: [takes off his hat] “Alright, Jim. Just trying to even things up, level that playing field. Won't happen again.”—Saturday Night Live, Season 26, Episode 3, Oct 21, 2000, Opening Skit