On The War on Terror

War. Spears, arrows, pikes, horses, shields, muskets, artillery, tanks, machine guns, rockets, fighters, bombers, etc. You get it. War has taken the shape of massive armies lined up in massive files facing each other across fields. It's been huge sorties dug in to endless trenches hurling grenades. It's been dogfights in the skies as fighters desperately try to down scores of bombers headed for a single target. It's been small elite forces attacking under cover of night to assassinate a key politician. It's even been small arms fighting in torn up urban areas.

But there's another kind of war. The War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on Illiteracy, and now the War on Terror. In this case, we've always been aware that the term "war" is really a misnomer. Obviously, there will be no smart bombs hurled at the homeless. We won't be sending the 7th Battalion capture the contestants of a spelling bee. We won't be sending ranks of tanks to the shipping lanes of the Gulf. We all get that. We understand that you can't really engage in a war on an ideal. It's impossible.

Our president, however, seems to have missed this day in class. His rhetoric is becoming dangerous because he's essentially mixing metaphors. He's using the real items of war to justify the state of a "war" on an ideal.

Think about it. Are we really ever destined to win the war on poverty? Of course not. The term developed as a figurative call to arms. It's function is to allow us to see a complicated situation in the simplest and most black-and-white manner. If we begin to see ourselves as the good guys and poverty as the bad guys, we can imagine taking up our weapons and marching to victory over the ideal of poverty. Get it? It's imagery.

Now, in the concrete world (as opposed to the abstract) war is something entirely different. There is (arguably) a beginning and an end. There's a way to keep a tally of deaths and injuries, targets eliminated, etc. The Geneva Convention concerns itself with the world-wide rules of concrete war. And here's where the Bush administration isn't playing fair. They're using the trappings of a concrete war as a justification for a figurative one.

Follow me. As the War on Terror (which began, first, as an attack on Afghanistan, continued through the invasion of Iraq, and now includes struggles in both those places as well as innumerable, seemingly unconnected events all over the globe) continues, Bush is using the concrete rules of engagement to justify treatment of prisoners, ownership of non-national infrastructure, and dealings with the press. But it's not a real war! He has said himself that he imagines the War on Terror will never actually end. In this he meant that it's a war on an ideal - a perpetual struggle to eliminate acts of terror (it should be noted that he and his cronies jumped all over John Kerry when he expressed exactly the same sentiment 2 years earlier). So Bush is having his cake and eating it too - and he's succeeding. A majority of Americans are content with the idea that we're at war ... and content that it may last forever!

Bush has successfully blurred the line between literal and figurative war. And those who are suffering are the thousands of prisoners being held without reason until it ends (you see, according to Bush it may never end!), the civilians suffering without infrastructure in Iraq (which is dealing with its own civil war), and Americans living with media which are playing softball so as not to subvert the war effort.