Month: August 2005

by hilzoy

Newsweek reports that we knew that Osama bin Laden was at Tora Bora, but let him slip away:

“In a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency’s Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. “He was there,” Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen’s remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. “We don’t know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001,” Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. “Bin Laden was never within our grasp.” Berntsen says Franks is “a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was.”

In his book—titled “Jawbreaker”—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon’s own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen’s lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book’s specifics, saying he’s awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a “strategic disaster” because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora “was not necessarily just the number of troops.””

Rumsfeld didn’t provide enough troops. That has an oddly familiar ring to it…

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by Charles

Words mean things, and the right word or phrase speaks volumes and sets the tone for communicating ideas.  Republican pollster Frank Luntz understands this, as does Berkeley professor George Lakoff in his Framing Wars.  If a phrase is turned just right, it has the advantage of being descriptive, true and all the while sounding good.  Conversely, bad phrasing can come off as obvious and desperate political spin, moving an idea or an issue backwards.  Also important is that the idea being framed happens to be a good and definitive one, otherwise it’s tantamount to lipstick on a pig, hence my general problem with Lakoff.  The final paragraph of Matt Bai’s piece:

What all these middling generalities suggest, perhaps, is that Democrats are still unwilling to put their more concrete convictions about the country into words, either because they don’t know what those convictions are or because they lack confidence in the notion that voters can be persuaded to embrace them. Either way, this is where the power of language meets its outer limit. The right words can frame an argument, but they will never stand in its place.

While the idea of fighting the War on Terror is right and necessary, the name itself has been lacking from the get-go.  It just doesn’t quite fit and it’s not quite enough.  A few days ago, the Weekly Standard remarked on a Bush administration trial balloon, where several Defense Department suits renamed the conflict from the Global War on Terror (GWOT)–or The War Against Terror (TWAT) or what have you–to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (GSAVE).  Ugh.  Thankfully, Bush has vetoed the renamers:

President Bush publicly overruled some of his top advisers on Wednesday in a debate about what to call the conflict with Islamic extremists, saying, "Make no mistake about it, we are at war."

I agree that we have to call this a war.  After all, our enemies call it such and al Qaeda has in fact declared war against us.  But we’re not at war with terror per se, but against militant radical Muslims who are not only fighting western countries but also moderate Muslims.  I’ve wondered about this terminology before and I think it’s fair to call it World War IV.  Because let’s face it, the Cold War really was World War III. 

Another fair phrasing of this conflict is the War Against Militant Islamists (WAMI), since it recognizes that we’re in a war and it identifies who we’re fighting against.  [Since they’re fighting us and fellow Muslims, it could even be considered a double WAMI 😉 ].  We’re not fighting all terrorists out there, so again the War on Terror is too broad and it implies that we’re fighting against a tactic.  Though they’re terrorists, we’re not at war against Columbian narcos or Tamil Tigers or the IRA.

A slight variation would be the War Against Militant Islamism, which recognizes that we’re battling the ideology that breeds Islamic terrorists.  This is somewhat akin to the nature of World War III, since we fought the spread of Soviet communism as well as hot wars such as Korea and Vietnam, and proxy fights and spy vs. spy skulduggery.  So must we fight the ideology of radical violent Islam (and moderate Muslims must take a stand here), as well as the physical battles and other fronts such as money, communications and propaganda.  Note also that the fight is not against Islamists or Islamism in general, but against the militant strains.  WAMI is a much better and more descriptive phrase than TWAT.

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