THE FOGHORN OF WAR: The Magic Word Of War

And It Ain't "Please"

I wonder if there's a number that demarcates the upper limit of acceptable civilian casualties in Gaza. Is it ten thousand? Twenty thousand? Thirty thousand? And how about dead children? How many children is Israel free to kill in trade for the children killed by Hamas, and how many non-combatants total can it kill in exchange for the elusive goal of "wiping Hamas from the face of the Earth"? Is there a number? Or is the acceptable number of non-combatants and children killed simply an as-yet undetermined statistic that will eventually be entered into a column on a spreadsheet in a soon-to-be dusty after-action report?

Of course, I ask these questions within the context of the Global War On Terror. The US piled-up hundreds of thousands of deaths in the wake of 9/11 ... and even went to a country with no demonstrable connection to 9/11 to collectively punish them for something they didn’t do. The US also collectively punished the Afghan people with bombs and drones and a grinding occupation because of their geographical proximity to al-Qaeda. In the process, the US added the deaths of hundreds of thousands of bystanders to its own spreadsheet of vengeance. There really wasn't an upper limit on the non-American casualties in any of Uncle Sam's post-9/11 punitive pursuits, which is important because what the US did after 9/11 has become a model of contemporary war-making … that is, if the enemy is "terrorism" or "terrorists" or, in a stroke of marketing genius, if you are fighting the amorphous specter of "terror." These are the magic words that now make anything and everything both possible and acceptable. Because “terrorism” is functionally interchangeable with “evil,” it’s incredibly easy to dismiss any collateral damage generated by the inherently righteous effort to eradicate evil. Just look at how little thought the American people have given to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans (among other nationalities) who died or were tortured for little more than revenge or because they lived near people identified as “terrorists.”

That’s why the champions of Israel’s right-to-do-whatever-it-sees-fit worked so hard to pressure the BBC to break with its long-standing policy of referring to non-state military actors like Hamas as “militants.” They instead demanded Hamas be referred to as “terrorists.” The BBC was calling them “militants” that, they’d then further stipulate, have been identified as “terrorists” the UK, the US and Israeli governments, among others. But now they’ve dropped “militant” and will heretofore call them “a terrorist organization proscribed by the U.K. government.” This breaks a practice that, as the BBC’s John Simpson explained, dates back to the Beebs’ founding. And it’s long been controversial, particularly at the height of the Irish Republican Army’s attacks on British targets in the 70s and 80s. Writing before the policy change, Simpson noted that the brutality of a given attack “doesn't mean that we should start saying that the organisation whose supporters have carried them out is a terrorist organisation, because that would mean we were abandoning our duty to stay objective.” Even during World War Two, the “BBC broadcasters were expressly told not to call the Nazis evil or wicked, even though we could and did call them ‘the enemy’.”

That commitment to objectivity was born out of a healthy respect for the power of words and, in particular, the impact words can have when they are broadcast with the imprimatur of “news.” The weaponization of that unique combination of extensive reach and psychological impact can lead, and all-too-often has led, to brutal excesses. Look no further than the immediate transformation of the US media on 9/11 for an example of how the abandonment of objectivity and the regurgitation of crucial words—like “terrorism”—can quickly become incitement instead of reporting. The context for the attack was lost and the history of how we got there was rendered not only superfluous, but even offensive. How can anyone question US policy around the Muslim world while the wreckage is still smoldering? And in that environment, who dared to bring up the troubling fact that today’s “terrorists” were yesterday’s “freedom fighters”? It’s that ever-shifting perspective that informed the BBC’s journalistically-sound commitment to objectivity. But now even the venerable Beeb finds itself bending under the weight of a marketing-driven world made in Uncle Sam’s internationally lawless image.

Ultimately, the Global War On Terror has become a kind of carte blanche for those nations that also shop at the supermarket of US military hardware. They are in the club and guaranteed impunity is its customer rewards program for top shoppers like Israel and Egypt and Saudi Arabia. And for all others, the not-so-small print of the Geneva Conventions still apply.