{"id":13104,"date":"2011-06-27T12:00:07","date_gmt":"2011-06-27T11:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=13104"},"modified":"2011-06-21T19:39:39","modified_gmt":"2011-06-21T18:39:39","slug":"attacking-libya-and-the-dictionary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2011\/06\/attacking-libya-and-the-dictionary\/","title":{"rendered":"Attacking Libya — And the Dictionary"},"content":{"rendered":"

If Americans Don\u2019t Get Hurt, War Is No Longer War<\/em><\/p>\n

The Obama administration has come up with a remarkable justification for going to war against Libya without the congressional approval required by the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973.<\/p>\n

American planes are taking off, they are entering Libyan air space, they are locating targets, they are dropping bombs, and the bombs are killing and injuring people and destroying things. It is war.<\/em> Some say it is a good war and some say it is a bad war, but surely it is<\/em> a war.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the Obama administration insists it is not<\/em> a war. <\/em>Why? \u00a0Because, according to<\/a> \u201cUnited States Activities in Libya,\u201d a 32-page report that the administration released<\/a> last week, \u201cU.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, the balance of forces is so lopsided in favor of the United States that no Americans are dying or are threatened with dying. War is only war, it seems, when Americans are dying, when we <\/em>die.\u00a0 When only they, <\/em>the Libyans, die, it is something else for which there is as yet apparently no name. When they attack, it is war. When we attack, it is not.<\/p>\n

This cannot be classified as anything but strange thinking and it depends, in turn, on a strange fact: that, in our day, it is indeed possible for some countries (or maybe only our own), for the first time in history, to wage war without receiving a scratch in return. This was nearly accomplished in the bombing of Serbia in 1999, in which only one American plane<\/a> was shot down (and the pilot rescued).<\/p>\n

The epitome of this new warfare is the predator drone<\/a>, which has become an emblem of the Obama administration. Its human operators can sit at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada or in Langley, Virginia, while the drone floats above Afghanistan or Pakistan or Yemen or Libya, pouring destruction down from the skies.\u00a0 War waged in this way is without casualties for the wager because none of its soldiers are near the scene of battle — if that is even the right word for what is going on.<\/p>\n

Some strange conclusions follow from this strange thinking and these strange facts. In the old scheme of things, an attack on a country was an act of war, no matter who launched it or what happened next.\u00a0 Now, the Obama administration claims that if the adversary cannot fight back, there is no war.<\/p>\n

It follows that adversaries of the United States have a new motive for, if not equaling us, then at least doing us some damage.\u00a0 Only then will they be accorded the legal protections (such as they are) of authorized war.\u00a0 Without that, they are at the mercy of the whim of the president.<\/p>\n

The War Powers Resolution<\/a> permits the president to initiate military operations only when the nation is directly attacked, when there is \u201ca national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.\u201d\u00a0 The Obama administration, however, justifies its actions in the Libyan intervention precisely on the grounds that there is no threat to the invading forces, much less the territories of the United States.<\/p>\n

There is a parallel here with the administration of George W. Bush on the issue of torture (though not, needless to say, a parallel between the Libyan war itself, which I oppose but whose merits can be reasonably debated, and torture, which was wholly reprehensible).\u00a0 President Bush wanted the torture he was ordering not <\/em>to be considered torture, so he arranged to get lawyers in the Justice department to write legal-sounding opinions excluding certain forms of torture, such as waterboarding, from the definition of the word.\u00a0 Those practices were thenceforward called \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, Obama wants his Libyan war not to be a war and so has arranged to define a certain kind of war — the American-casualty-free kind — as not <\/em>war (though without even<\/a> the full support of his own lawyers). Along with Libya, a good English word — war — is under attack.<\/p>\n

In these semantic operations of power upon language, a word is separated from its commonly accepted meaning. The meanings of words are one of the few common grounds that communities naturally share. When agreed meanings are challenged, no one can use the words in question without stirring up spurious \u201cdebates,\u201d as happened with the word torture. For instance, mainstream news organizations, submissive to George Bush\u2019s decisions on the meanings of words, stopped calling<\/a> waterboarding torture and started calling it other things, including \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques,\u201d but also \u201charsh treatment,\u201d \u201cabusive practices,\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n

Will the news media now stop calling the war against Libya a war?\u00a0 No euphemism for war has yet caught on, though soon after launching its Libyan attacks, an administration official proposed<\/a> the phrase \u201ckinetic military action\u201d and more recently, in that 32-page report, the term of choice was \u201climited military operations.\u201d No doubt someone will come up with something catchier soon.<\/p>\n

How did the administration twist itself into this pretzel? An interview that Charlie Savage and Mark Landler of the New York Times <\/em>held<\/a> with State Department legal advisor Harold Koh sheds at least some light on the matter.\u00a0 Many administrations and legislators have taken issue with the War Powers Resolution, claiming it challenges powers inherent in the presidency. Others, such as Bush administration Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, have argued<\/a> that the Constitution\u2019s plain declaration that Congress \u201cshall declare war\u201d does not mean what most readers think it means, and so leaves the president free to initiate all kinds of wars.<\/p>\n

Koh has long opposed these interpretations — and in a way, even now, he remains consistent. Speaking for the administration, he still upholds Congress\u2019s power to declare war and the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution. \u201cWe are not saying the president can take the country into war on his own,\u201d he told<\/a> the Times<\/em>. \u201cWe are not saying the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional or should be scrapped or that we can refuse to consult Congress. We are saying the limited nature of this particular mission is not the kind of \u2018hostilities\u2019 envisioned by the War Powers Resolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a curious way, then, a desire to avoid challenge to existing law has forced assault on the dictionary. For the Obama administration to go ahead with a war lacking any form of Congressional authorization, it had to challenge either law or the common meaning of words. Either the law or language had to give.<\/p>\n

It chose language.<\/p>\n

____________________<\/p>\n

Jonathan Schell is the Doris M. Shaffer Fellow at The Nation Institute, and a Senior Lecturer at Yale University.\u00a0 He is the author of several books, including <\/em>The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2011 Jonathan Schell.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If Americans Don\u2019t Get Hurt, War Is No Longer War – For the Obama administration to go ahead with a war lacking any form of Congressional authorization, it had to challenge either law or the common meaning of words. Either the law or language had to give. It chose language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-militarism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}