Don't Mention the War
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Bill Clinton was ambiguous
about the definition of “sex” and “is”. Barack Obama
is uncertain about what the definition of “war”
might be.
And wars are central to the
duties of the man in the White House.
Whether or not we’re in a war depends on who you ask
and on which day of the week you ask him. Secretary
of State John Kerry said that bombing ISIS in two
countries wasn’t a war. After the White House
spokesman said it is a war, Kerry agreed that maybe
it might be a war after all.
Forget about finding a strategy, this administration
can’t even agree on whether the thing that it needs
to find a strategy for is a war.
Democrats don’t like the “W” word. They bomb more
countries than Republicans do, but they find a
prettier name for it.
One of the first things that Obama did in Iraq was
to change the name of the war. It was no longer
Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was now Operation New
Dawn. Even though there were 50,000 troops in Iraq,
the combat mission was officially over. The 50,000
were renamed “Advise and Assist” brigades.
As John and Yoko said, the “W” word really could be
over if you wanted it to be. Or pretended it was.
Obama bombed Libya to implement regime change, but
no one called it a war. It was just one of those
things where we dropped a lot of bombs on another
country in coordination with rebels on the ground to
help them take over that country. Definitely not a
war. Possibly one of those “man-caused disasters”.
At least that was how Obama Inc. tried to rename
terrorism in the early heady days of hope and
change.
A compulsive need to avoid calling things what they
are is an obvious form of denial. But when a
politician at the head of a government begins
behaving in that shifty way, it’s also deeply
dishonest.
Democrats could defend Bill Clinton’s need to lie
about what they termed his private life, but even
they can’t defend an administration that plays
Clintonesque word games with something as big as a
war.
We are currently not in a war with the Islamic
State, which according to this administration is
neither Islamic nor a State, with a strategy of
possibly destroying them (unless that doesn’t work
out and then we’ll settle for degrading them) and we
are backed in this non-war by a coalition of Muslim
nations that can’t as of yet be named, but which
have possibly pledged to help us with certain
undetermined things.
These undetermined things include aiding the Syrian
Islamist rebels, some of whom are fighting alongside
ISIS, some of whom are fighting ISIS and some of
whom switch back and forth based on their mood, the
latest shipment of TOW missiles from the CIA and how
much the Saudis are paying them.
We don’t know a lot more about the war, which may or
may not be a war, than we know about it.
And that’s the problem.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was mocked for
talking about “known unknowns” and “unknown
unknowns” by people who are too stupid to realize
that their ignorance has turned the world around
them into “unknown unknowns”.
Obama’s culture of denial, his charm bracelets of
Orwellian synonyms for conflict that seem to have
been invented by a bureaucrat with no sense of
humor, turn everything into unknown unknowns. If we
can’t even properly define what we’re doing, how can
we do it at all? If we can’t even admit that we’re
fighting a war and that ISIS is inspired by Islam,
how can we beat an enemy that we can’t fight or
name?
For the longest time this administration refused
to admit that ISIS was a threat or that it was at
war with us. Only when the Jihadists were preparing
to knock on the doors of the US embassy in Baghdad,
was it finally able, after a delay of some weeks, to
use the “W” word.
What you call something is important. Ideologues,
like the kind that fill the ranks of Obama Inc,
think that changing a name changes reality. It
doesn’t. A rose will still be the same plant by any
other name and ISIS will still be the same band of
Islamic headchoppers even if you insist on referring
to them as a junior varsity team of man-caused
disasters belonging to no particular faith or
religion.
It’s your awareness of reality that changes.
Casinos and credit card companies use substitution
to diminish your awareness that you are spending
money. Drug companies play soothing music and show
pastoral scenes while telling you the lethal side
effects. Car salesmen and cable companies avoid
giving you the full amount that you’ll be paying.
Obama has a bad habit of using these same tactics.
His administration tried to make the illegal war in
Libya look good by refusing to call it a war and
comparing the cost to the Iraq War using bogus
figures. It tried to erase the existence of
terrorism by refusing to use the word to describe
terrorist attacks that were taking place, whether at
Fort Hood or in Benghazi.
His tactics showed that he didn’t believe that the
problem was terrorism, but the overreaction of
Americans to terrorism. All he had to do whitewash
every attack as an isolated incident that had
nothing to do with Islamic terrorism and then
Americans would cease to be aware of terrorism. If
Iraq were to vanish from the evening news, no one
would know that Al Qaeda there was getting bigger
and bolder.
In the latest leaked private conversations printed
in the New York Times, Obama whines and mopes, he
blasts critics and denies that his policies have
failed. Despite his muscular rhetoric in public, in
private he complains that he is being stampeded into
bombing ISIS. It’s a revealing conversation because
it shows a man who believes that his failures are
not the problem. It’s other people becoming aware of
those failures that concerns him and forces him into
addressing them. ISIS isn’t the problem: America is.
ISIS is to Obama as Monica was to Bill Clinton.
They’re both the dirty little secrets of powerful
men that they did everything possible to hide. And
once that was no longer an option, they quibbled
over words.
Denial only works until reality forcibly intrudes.
Even with a friendly media, the philandering of the
President of the United States couldn’t continue
indefinitely. And even with a friendly media, the
rise of a new generation of Al Qaeda after the Arab
Spring wouldn’t stay buried in the back pages
forever.
It was only a matter of time until everyone knew.
Futile exercises like debating the meaning of “War”
are delaying tactics. People are not interested in
abstractions like the meaning of “Is”, “War”, “Sex”
or “You can keep your doctor”. They take words at
their common meaning. If bombs are falling, it’s a
war. And if it’s a war, then it has to be won.
Democrats don’t believe in wars now because they
don’t believe in winning. Instead of wars, they
spend a lot of time on “interventions” as if
dropping tons of explosives on a country is like
telling your drunk cousin to stop drinking. They
never win any of these interventions and that’s fine
because Americans don’t really care what happens in
Yugoslavia, Haiti or Somalia.
But on September 11, thousands were murdered in one
day. The Democrats don’t like calling what happened
on that day an act of war. Americans however know
it’s a war and are determined to win it.
Obama was guiding Americans away from the awareness
that we were in a war. In wars, someone wins and
someone loses. If he refused to call it a war, maybe
we wouldn’t realize that we were losing.