War Words, 2003-2007

The term "war hawk" was first used in 1798 by Thomas Jefferson to describe his Federalist opponents who urged a war on France, Since then, variations have remained in our political language, according to Safire's Political Dictionary, and the most famous was during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis which popularized the dichotomy of "hawks and doves" -- the arguments about military force vs. diplomacy.

In 2002, before the Iraq war, The New Hampshire Gazette in reporting about the military force Vs diplomacy arguments between the Defense Department and the State Department humorously used the term "chicken hawks" to describe the Bush administration's "hawks" (including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz) who in their youth had managed to avoid service in the Vietnam war. The New Hampshire Gazette defined as "chicken hawks": "public persons – generally male – who (1) tend to advocate military solutions to political problems, and who have personally (2) declined to take advantage of significant opportunity to serve in uniform during wartime."

As Jim Lobe reported (September 9, 2002): "There's more combat experience on the 7th floor of the State Department than in the entire Office of the Secretary of Defense," quipped the high-ranking State Department official to a room filled with senior military officers last month. The statement "generated riotous applause," according to an eyewitness quoted in the Nelson Report, a private newsletter subscribed to by foreign-policy heavyweights and embassies in Washington. The incident revealed the growing importance of the "Chicken Hawk" factor in the increasingly rancorous debate over the Bush administration's push toward war on Iraq and beyond.

At the moment, the military brass is leading the opposition. It includes both the folks who will have to fight this war and those who have retired from the service. The list of former generals includes Secretary of State and former Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and his deputy, U.S. Naval Academy grad and Vietnam veteran Richard Armitage; as well as veterans of the Gulf War, including most famously Bush Sr.'s national security adviser, ret. Gen. Brent Scowcroft; the Gulf War commander, ret. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf; and his logistics chief and later successor at Central Command, ret. Gen. Anthony Zinni.

"It is interesting to me that many of those who want to rush this country into war and think it would be so quick and easy don't know anything about war," said Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), one of the most outspoken skeptics of the war with Baghdad. "They come at it from an intellectual perspective versus having sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off," the Vietnam veteran added. Hagel is not alone. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a highly decorated fellow Vietnam veteran who turned against the war, is also openly skeptical."
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Veteran investigative reporter, Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, detailing the 16 month period between Sept 11, 2001 and the March 2003 start of the Iraq war, is rich with the informal metaphoric language used so naturally by the White House war planners. CIA Director George Tenet, for example, using a sports metaphor, assured the President that the WMD case against Saddam Hussein was a "slam dunk." (p.249, 438)

President Bush, speaking to British journalists, praised Prime Minister Tony Blair's resolve by saying (p.178) that "he had cojones" (that's macho Texas talk for balls).

And, as the AP reported (April 17, 2004), "Over a period that began in early 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell is depicted as having cautioned Mr. Bush and other advisers repeatedly about the potential drawbacks of military action in Iraq. The 'you break it, you buy it'' principle he cited in delivering those warnings was privately known to Mr. Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, as the 'Pottery Barn rule,' the book says."

But, perhaps the most important metaphor was the smoking gun ... mushroom cloud phrasing, attributed first to Condoleezza Rice on September 8, 2002 (p.179), then repeated a month later, October 7, by President Bush: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." (p.202)

William Safire (p.661) gave us the definition of the metaphor "smoking gun" (as "incontrovertible evidence the proof of guilt that precipitates resignations") and its political history, especially related to the discovery of the secret tape-recording by President Nixon, the smoking gun which prompted his resignation a few days later. Since the 1945 photos of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the mushroom cloud imagery has been an intense nonverbal icon suggesting the catastrophe of a nuclear war.

President Bush frequently used the term "weapons of mass destruction" (a general term, covering chemical, biological, and radiological weapons), emphasizing the accepted facts that Hussein had already used WMD (i.e. gas against the Kurds at Halabja); but , with the mushroom cloud image, the President uses specific nonverbal imagery of another, different, and unsubstantiated WMD.

Asserting("clear evidence"), but not substantiating it, was a useful way to persuade the general public by associating these two metaphors. In logic, such unsupported claims or asssertions are labeled petitio principii, a fallacy commonly termed in Englsh, "begging the question."

Question-begging means asserting to be true that which needs to be proven. This was a common and consistent refrain by President Bush ("because I said so!") who used the sound-bite advantage when journalists asked questions critical of him at press conferences. He often responded to a question with an assertion, then move on to another reporter.

For example, when veteran White House correspondant Helen Thomas (who had been long ignored) finally was allowed to question the President (3/21/06), she asked:" I'd like to ask you, Mr. President, your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House, from your Cabinet -- your Cabinet officers, intelligence people, and so forth -- what was your real reason? You have said it wasn't oil -- quest for oil, it hasn't been Israel, or anything else. What was it?" [ Read the full text here] The president responded with an assertion, conflated the Afghanistan Taliban with Saddam Hussein, then went on to another questioner. At such press conferences (unlike legal cross-examinations, or even the British Parliament's weekly Question Period), the speaker is in control, able to recognize people or to divert attention away from negative issues. Many White House reporters criticized Helen Thomas for being rude by asking such questions. But, as Jack Anderson once wrote, many reporters are lap dogs, not watchdogs, wanting to remain on good terms with the rich and powerful.

In Slate, Jack Shaefer, basically said a plague-on-both-your-houses: "We could applaud her for stripping the varnish off standard-issue White House lies with her acerbic questions, but rarely are her questions tailored to produce an intelligent response from [the then Press Secretary Ari] Fleischer. When you repeatedly ask the question, "Why does he want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis?" you're mostly venting your spleen. Not that Fleischer would give a useful answer to a direct question in any case. The same goes for his boss. White House briefings and presidential news conferences have become so ritualized and substanceless that many of the beat reporters have begun exhibiting all the classic symptoms of depression: guilt, worthlessness, pessimism, restlessness, and irritability."
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"The Fog of War" received the Academy Award (March, 2004) as the winning documentary movie about Robert McNamara (the Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war) relating his decision-making role then, and now admitting he made some errors, but attributed them, metaphorically, to "the fog of war."

Richard Falk (The Great Terror War, 2003) in his review of this documentary wrote: "The title The Fog of War is a phrase taken from Karl von Clausewitz, the early-19th-century German war theorist, and is used to explain the inability of a military commander to grasp the full realities of a battlefield given its complexity. It bears so centrally on the McNamara enigma because it is exculpatory in effect, suggesting that the mistakes of war are due to its complexity -- rather than the incompetence or depravity of the leaders who impart it. What is misleading here is that Clausewitz used the phrase to explain why tactical errors are made in war, while McNamara is indirectly excusing moral shortcomings, including those that have criminalized by international law."

War Words:
Iraq War & the "War on Terror" -- GWOT

A key issue is conflating -- or blending, merging -- these two concepts (the Iraq War, and the "Global War on Terrorism") into one. The Bush administration, for example, so frequently associated al Queada's 9/11 attacks and Osama bin Laden with Saddam Hussein, that this implied that they were connected, cause-and-effect. Eventually, President Bush would say "I never said that..." (True. Never an explicit statement; But, that answer is not candid nor complete.)

-----See also: Law Not War | Bush Revises Stance || A war that can never be won | Playing into Their Hands | War or Shabby PR Ploy? | Stop Calling it War | War Rhetoric's Toll on Democracy | Sell it Softly | Violence & Terror

President George W. Bush, in a formal speech (March 19, 2004) on the first anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, called attention to the underlying metaphoric language of war, but emphatically asserted that it was not a simple metaphor: "The war on terror is not a figure of speech. It is an inescapable calling of our generation."

President Bush, who by his own admission doesn't read newspapers or poetry, isn't likely to be aware of Lakoff nor of metaphor theory. (Below) However, Bush's speechwriter, Mike Gerson, who puts the elegant words into the president's mouth, is one of the most skillful writers ever to work in the White House, and is sure to be aware of the arguments about framing the issue of terrorism in terms of war metaphors -- instead of crime metaphors.

Five days after September 11, 2001, George Lakoff (in his article "Metaphors of Terror"), quick to understand the implications of framing the issue, wrote:

"The administration's framings and reframings and its search for metaphors should be noted. The initial framing was as a "crime" with "victims" and "perpetrators" to be "brought to justice" and "punished." The crime frame entails law, courts, lawyers, trials, sentencing, appeals, and so on. It was hours before "crime" changed to "war" with "casualties," "enemies," "military action," "war powers," and so on.

Donald Rumsfeld and other administration officials have pointed out that this situation does not fit our understanding of a "war." There are "enemies" and "casualties" all right, but no enemy army, no regiments, no tanks, no ships, no air force, no battlefields, no strategic targets, and no clear "victory." The war frame just doesn't fit. Colin Powell had always argued that no troops should be committed without specific objectives, a clear and achievable definition of victory, a clear exit strategy—and no open-ended commitments. But he has pointed out that none of these is present in this "war."

Because the concept of "war "doesn't fit, there is a frantic search for metaphors. First, Bush called the terrorists "cowards"—but this didn't seem to work too well for martyrs who willing sacrificed their lives for their moral and religious ideals. More recently he has spoken of "smoking them out of their holes" as if they were rodents, and Rumsfeld has spoken of "drying up the swamp they live in" as if they were snakes or lowly swamp creatures. The conceptual metaphors here are Moral Is Up; Immoral Is Down (they are lowly) and Immoral People Are Animals (that live close to the ground)....

With no definition of victory and no exit strategy, we may be entering a state of perpetual war. This would be very convenient for the conservative domestic agenda: The war machine will determine the domestic agenda, which will allow conservatives to do whatever they want in the name of national security...."

James Carroll's column in the Boston Globe (Sept. 15, 2001) clearly presented the moral case against using war metaphors -- instead of crime metaphors. "In the Arab world --indeed, throughout the whole House of Islam -- bin Laden's stature was in the process of being transformed from a marginal miscreant to a modern-day Saladin, the hero who vanquished crusaders. Bush's war on terrorism, by defining bin Laden as a martial adversary instead of a sadistic criminal, had elevated him to a mythic status. The "war" on terrorism, in that sense, was lost the day Bush declared it."

Yet, four years later (in 2005), the war metaphor is still the most common one used by the administration and by the mass media, perhaps because it makes for good soundbites, shorthand, slogans, and sarcasm.

Such metaphors imply the way people think. Headlines, for example: "Rove Draws a Hard Line Between Conservatives, Liberals Over 9/11." (Los Angeles Times, June 24, 2005): "A partisan furor erupted Thursday as Democrats assailed President Bush's top political strategist, Karl Rove, for criticizing liberals over what he described as a tepid response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks."

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Rove said Wednesday night at a Manhattan gathering of the Conservative Party of New York state."

While "preparing indictments" might legitimately be called a reference to the use of law, here linking the added sarcasm of "therapy and understanding" misrepresents the Liberal position. Carroll, for example, in that essay immediately after 9/11, affimed the need for a forceful response: "Before going any further, let me state the obvious. The nearly worldwide consensus that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington must be met with force is entirely correct. The network of suicidal mass murderers, however large and wherever hidden, must be eliminated. But force can be exercised decisively and overwhelmingly in another context than that of 'war.'"

Early in the Iraq war, very few politicians challenged this use of the war metaphor, but there were some signs of awareness of its implications. On April 18, 2004, CNN reported that Democratic candidate John Kerry said: "It may well be that we need a new president, a breath of fresh air, to re-establish credibility with the rest of the world, so that we can have a believable administration as to how we proceed." Kerry also said he didn't consider the war on terrorism primarily a military effort. "I will use our military when necessary, but it is not primarily a military operation," he said. "It's an intelligence-gathering, law-enforcement, public-diplomacy effort."

Bush Revises Stance on War on Terrorism
'We will win,' he tells veterans as Democrats
continue to criticize his previous comment.
By Edwin Chen Los Angeles Times September 1, 2004

NASHVILLE — President Bush forcefully and repeatedly declared Tuesday that the war on terrorism was winnable, a day after he touched off a partisan tempest by saying on national television, "I don't think you can win it."

In a speech to the national convention of the American Legion, Bush told cheering veterans: "We meet today at a time of war for our country, a war we did not start, yet one that we will win. If America shows weakness or uncertainty in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch."

His comments came a day after Democrats sharply criticized the president for remarks he made to interviewer Matt Lauer of NBC's "Today" show that were aired Monday. "I don't think you can win it," Bush said of the fight against terrorism, "but I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."

The campaign of the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, pounced on Bush's latest comments.

"What today showed is that George Bush might be able to read a speech saying we can win the war on terror. But as we saw yesterday, he's clearly got real doubts about his ability to do so, and with good reason," spokesman Phil Singer said.

Kerry addressed Bush's remarks for the first time Tuesday night during a rally on the airport tarmac here; he is scheduled to address the American Legion today.

"All they're talking about is the war on terror, which the president yesterday said he doesn't think we can win," Kerry told hundreds of whooping supporters. "Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you something: We can, we must and we will win the war on terror. And the way to win … is fight a smarter, more effective war on terror."

Bush administration and campaign officials sought Tuesday to explain the president's comments to NBC. Vice President Dick Cheney, First Lady Laura Bush and campaign and administration staff said the president believed that the fight against terror would end in victory but that the long-term nature of the war meant that it would not end unequivocally, with a treaty-signing ceremony.

Bush, as a call-in guest on the Rush Limbaugh show Tuesday, said, "Really what I was saying to Lauer was, is that this is not the kind of war where you sit down and sign a peace treaty. It's a totally different kind of war. But we will win it.

"I probably needed to be a little more articulate," he said.

Bush told the American Legion convention, "Make no mistake about it, we are winning, and we will win. We will win by staying on the offensive. We will win by spreading liberty."

Calling in to the Sean Hannity talk show on Fox Radio on Tuesday afternoon, Cheney said that "the president never intended to convey the notion that we can't win. We clearly can, and we will."

Mrs. Bush commented during three interviews on the morning news shows, and campaign advisor Karen Hughes spoke later in the day on television.

White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., speaking on CNN, said, "I don't think we're ever going to find a situation where every individual terrorist is eliminated. I do think that we will win the war on terror, and I think that we will prevail."

The about-face pointed up Bush's reliance on his credentials as a "wartime president" in his bid for a second term.

Singer, the Kerry campaign spokesman, sought to cast doubt on those credentials. "This president has gone from mission accomplished to mission miscalculated to mission impossible on the war on terror," he said. "We need a leader who knows we can win the war on terror and has a plan to do it. America can do better than a go-it-alone foreign policy that has alienated key allies, leaving U.S. troops bearing the overwhelming burden in Iraq and U.S. taxpayers shouldering the bulk of the cost."

Also Tuesday, Bush campaigned in Iowa and dropped by an evening picnic and softball game in central Pennsylvania between Pennsylvania Young Republicans and Pennsylvania College Republicans. He also addressed the Republican National Convention in New York, using videoconferencing equipment.

Today the president is scheduled to campaign in Ohio before traveling to New York for the GOP nominating convention.
In his remarks in Nashville, Bush talked about his support for veterans' benefits as well as a constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration. He was accompanied by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Vietnam War veteran and rival for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000.
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Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

War, 2006
President Bush reiterated the "war" phrasing again (March 16, 2006) in the introduction to the administration's National Security Strategy. http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/nationalsecurity/

"We are a nation at war. We have made progress in the war against terror, but we are in a long struggle. America is safer, but not yet safe.
• In the short run, the fight involves using military force and other instruments of national power to kill or capture the terrorists, deny them safe haven or control of any nation, prevent them from gaining access to weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and cut off their sources of support.
• In the long run, winning the war on terror means winning the battle of ideas, for it is ideas that can turn the disenchanted into murderers willing to kill innocent victims.
• Terrorists exploit political alienation. Democracy gives people an ownership stake in society.
• Terrorists exploit grievances that can be blamed on others. Democracy offers the rule of law, the peaceful resolution of disputes, and the habits of advancing interests through compromise.
• Terrorists exploit sub-cultures of conspiracy and misinformation. Democracy offers freedom of speech, independent media, and the marketplace of ideas.
• Terrorists exploit an ideology that justifies murder. Democracy offers respect for human dignity.
• The advance of freedom and human dignity through democracy is the long-term solution to the transnational terrorism of today. To create the space and time for that long-term solution to take root, there are four steps we will take in the short term: We will 1) prevent attacks by terrorist networks before they occur; 2) deny WMD to rogue states and to terrorist allies who would use them without hesitation; 3) deny terrorist groups the support and sanctuary of rogue states; and 4) deny the terrorists control of any nation that they would use as a base and launching pad for terror. "

War, not law enforcement
President Bush reiterates his position: extract from CQ text transcript, Aug 21, 2006 --

BUSH: Look, it's an honest debate, and it's an important debate for Americans to listen to and to be engaged in. In our judgment, the consequences for defeat in Iraq are unacceptable.

And I fully understand that some didn't think we ought to go in there in the first place.

But defeat -- if you think it's bad now, imagine what Iraq would look like if the United States leaves before this government can defend itself and sustain itself.
You know, chaos in Iraq would be very unsettling in the region.

Leaving before the job would be done would send a message that America really is no longer engaged nor cares about the form of governments in the Middle East.

Leaving before the job is done would send a signal to our troops that the sacrifices they made were not worth it.

Leaving before the job is done would be a disaster. And that's what we're saying.

I will never question the patriotism of somebody who disagrees with me. This has nothing to do with patriotism. It has everything to do with understanding the world in which we live.

It's like, the other day, I was critical of those who heralded the federal judge's opinion about the terrorist surveillance program. I thought it was a terrible opinion. And that's why we're appealing it.

And I have no -- you know, look, I understand how democracy works. Quite a little bit of criticism in it, which is fine. That's fine. That's part of the process.
But I have every right, as do my administration, to make it clear what the consequences would be of policy. And if we think somebody is strong or doesn't see the world the way it is, we'll continue to point that out to people.

And therefore those who heralded the decision not to give law enforcement the tools necessary to protect the American people just simply don't see the world the way we do. They see maybe these kind of isolated incidents. These aren't isolated incidents; they're tied together. There is a global war going on.
And, you know, somebody said: Well, this is law enforcement.

No, this isn't law enforcement, in my judgment. Law enforcement means kind of a simple, you know, singular response to the problem. This is a global war on terror. We're facing, you know, extremists that believe something. And they want to achieve objectives.

And, therefore, the United States must use all our assets and we must work with others to defeat this enemy. That's the call.

And we -- in the short run, we got to stop them from attacking us. That's why I give the Tony Blair government great credit, and their intelligence officers -- and our own government credit for working with the Brits to stop this attack.

But you know something? It's an amazing town -- isn't it? -- you know, where they say on the one hand you can't have the tools necessary and herald the fact that you won't have the tools necessary to defend the people and, sure enough, attack would occur, and say, "How come you don't have the tools necessary to defend the people?"

That's the way we think around this town.

And so we'll continue to speak out in a respectful way; never challenging somebody's love for America when you criticize their strategies or their point of view.
And, you know, for those who say that, well, all they're trying to say is, "We're not patriotic," simply don't listen to our words very carefully, do they?

What matters is that in this campaign that we clarify the different points of view. And there are a lot of people in the Democratic Party who believe that the best course of action is to leave Iraq before the job is done. Period. And they're wrong.

And the American people have got to understand the consequence of leaving Iraq before the job is done. We're not going to leave Iraq before the job is done and we'll complete the mission in Iraq.

I can't tell you exactly when it's going to be done, but I do know that it's important for us to support the Iraqi people who have shown incredible courage in their desire to live in a free society. And if we ever give up the desire to help people live in freedom, we will have lost our soul as a nation, as far as I'm concerned.... (Aug 21, 2006)

Law Not War
by James Carroll

Written just days after 9/11, James Carroll's timely column in the Boston Globe (Sept.15, 2001), which has been reprinted in his book: Crusade (2004), presents the moral case against using the metaphor of war

How we love our country! For days now, we Americans, while mourning and shuddering, have felt the accumulating weight of our patriotic devotion. We are joined in the shocking recognition of what a rare and precious treasure is the United States of America. Our nation's sudden vulnerability makes us shrug off, just as suddenly, the habit of taking for granted its nobility. We see it in the throat-choking empty place of the New York skyline, and in the gaping wound of the building beside Arlington Cemetery. We see it in the grimy faces of the resolute rescue workers, and in the implication that doomed airline passengers fought back against hijackers. We see it in the splendid diversity of our features, our accents, our beliefs, our responses even. Never has the national motto seemed more true: out of many, one.

But so far our main expression of this intense patriotism has been oddly in tension with its inner meaning, for the thing we treasure above all about America at this moment is the way it measures its hope by principles of democracy, tolerance, law, respect for the other, and even social compassion. Our supreme patriotic gesture in this crisis has been a nearly universal call for war, and indeed the growing sentiment for war, fueled by the rhetoric of our highest leaders, may soon be embodied in a formal congressional declaration of war. Before we go much farther, we should think carefully about why we are heading down this path, and where it is likely to lead. Do the rhetoric of war, and the actions it already sets in motion, really serve the urgent purpose of stopping terrorism? And is the launching of war really the only way to demonstrate our love for America?

Before going any farther, let me state the obvious. The nearly worldwide consensus that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington must be met with force is entirely correct. The network of suicidal mass murderers, however large and wherever hidden, must be eliminated. But force can be exercised decisively and overwhelmingly in another context than that of "war." One of the great advances in civilization occurred when human beings found a way to channel necessary violence away from "war" and toward a new, counterbalancing context embodied in the idea of "law." The distinction may seem too fine to be relevant in the aftermath of this catastrophe, but it is after catastrophe that the distinction matters most. The difference between "war" and "law" is not the use of force. The United States of America, with its world allies, should be embarked not on a war but on an unprecedented, swift, sure, and massive campaign of law enforcement. As the term law enforcement implies, the proper use of force would be of the essence of this campaign.

Why does this distinction matter? Four reasons:

War, by definition, is an activity undertaken against a political or social entity, while the terrorist network responsible for this catastrophe, from all reports, is a coalition of individuals, perhaps a large one. Law enforcement, by definition, is an activity undertaken against just such individuals or networks. By clothing our response to the terrorist acts in the rhetoric of war, we make it far more likely that members of groups associated by extrinsic factors with the perpetrators (Arabs, Muslims, Afghans, Pakistanis, etc.) will suffer terrible consequences, from being bombed in Kabul to being discriminated against in Boston. Furthermore, the rhetoric of war, as it falls on the ears of such people (a billion Muslims), makes it all the more likely that they will only see America as their enemy.

War, by definition, is relatively imprecise. Steps can be taken to limit "collateral damage," but the method of war, in fact, is to bring pressure to bear against a hostile power structure by inflicting suffering on the society of which it is part. History shows that once wars begin, violence becomes general. As President Bush threatened, no distinctions are made. In law enforcement, by contrast, distinctions remain of the essence. Law enforcement submits to disciplines that are jettisoned in war. Do we really have the right to jettison such disciplines now?

War, similarly, is less concerned with procedure than with result; or, more plainly, in war the ends justify the means. In law enforcement, the end remains embodied in the means, which is why procedures are so scrupulously observed in criminal justice activity. To respond to a terrorist's grievous violation of the social order with further violations of that order means the terrorist has won.

War inevitably generates its own momentum, which has a way of inhumanely overwhelming the humane purposes for which the war is begun in the first place. In the death-ground of combat violence, self-criticism can seem like fatal self-doubt, and so the savage momentum of war is rarely recognized as such until too late. The rule of unintended consequences universally applies in war. Law enforcement, on the other hand, with its system of checks and balances between police and courts, is inevitably self-critical. The moral link between act and consequence is far more likely to be protected.

What does "winning" a war against terrorism mean? How has hatred of America become a source of meaning for vast numbers whose poverty already amounts to a state of war? Must a massive campaign of unleashed violence become America's new source of meaning, too? The World Trade Center was a symbol of the social, economic, and political hope Americans treasure, a hope embodied above all in law. To win the struggle against terrorism means inspiring that same hope in the hearts of all who do not have it. How we respond to this catastrophe will define our patriotism, shape the century, and memorialize our beloved dead.

"In the Arab world --indeed, throughout the whole House of Islam -- bin Laden's stature was in the process of being transformed from a marginal miscreant to a modern-day Saladin, the hero who vanquished crusaders. Bush's war on terrorism, by defining bin Laden as a martial adversary instead of a sadistic criminal, had elevated him to a mythic status. The "war" on terrorism, in that sense, was lost the day Bush declared it." -- James Carroll, Crusade (p.208)
In addition to his book (Crusade), James Carroll is the bestselling author of the National Book Award-winning memoir An American Requiem; Constantine's Sword, a history of Christian anti-Semitism; and ten novels. He lectures widely on war and peace and on Jewish-Christian-Muslim reconciliation. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts. For more information, please visit www.americanempireproject.com | Copyright © 2004 James Carroll

A war that can never be won
Terrorism is a technique, not an enemy state that can be defeated
Jonathan Steele Saturday November 22, 2003 The Guardian

The bombast has increased with the bombs. We saw two disturbing escalations this week. The explosions that devastated the British consulate and the HSBC bank in Istanbul mark a significant widening in the choice of targets by those Islamist radicals who use terror to express their hatred of British and US policy in Iraq and the Middle East. The Blair/Bush response reached an equally alarming new level of ferocity.

At their swaggering joint press conference on Thursday, the two men repeatedly made the risible claim that they could win their war on terror. The prime minister was the worse. While Bush gave himself a global carte blanche to intervene anywhere, by speaking of his "determination to fight and defeat this evil, wherever it is found", Blair put the issue in terms of a finite goal. He talked of defeating terrorism "utterly" and "ridding our world of this evil once and for all".

The hyperbole of the religious pulpit allows for all-embracing and eschatological language, but these men are meant to be practical political leaders. When Blair, in his opposition days, invented the phrase "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime", he knew that crime could never be totally eliminated. The task is to reduce and restrain it by a variety of methods. Violence and terrorism are no different. Like poverty, they will always be with us. At best they can only be diminished and contained. Yet now, with the arrogance of power, we have the Bush/Blair roadshow promising in sub-Churchillian tones to vanquish terrorism as though it were a clearly defined enemy like Nazi Germany.

Terrorism is a technique. It is not an ideology or a political philosophy, let alone an enemy state. Our leaders' failure to understand that point emerged immediately after September 11 2001 when they reacted to the attacks in New York and Washington by confusing the hunt for the perpetrators with the Afghan "state" that allegedly "harboured" them. The Taliban ran avicious regime, but Afghanistan was a disastrously failed state and its nominal leader, Mullah Omar, had no control over al-Qaida.

By the same token the "war" on terror should have remained what it initially was, a metaphor like the "war" on drugs. But instead of being harmless linguistic exaggeration to describe a broad campaign encompassing a range of political, economic and police counter-measures, it was narrowed down to real war and nothing else. The slippery slope that began with Afghanistan quickly led to the invasion of Iraq, a symbolic and political enormity whose psychological impact Bush and Blair have not yet grasped.

When Ariel Sharon, then a middle-aged general, wanted to send Israeli tanks into Cairo in October 1973, it was the arch-realist Henry Kissinger who realised how devastating the emotional effect would be in the Arab world, and stopped him. For a new generation of Arabs, the sight of American tanks in Baghdad is just as humiliating. Osama bin Laden's claim that having US forces at airbases close to the Islamic holy places in Saudi Arabia is a desecration appealed only to a few Muslims, but the daily television pictures of US troops in the heart of an Arab capital, and not just patrolling but using lethal force to back up an administration of occupiers, inflames a much larger audience.

Jack Straw argues that terrorism preceded the war on Iraq and it is therefore wrong to blame the US and Britain for increasing the danger. This is a non-sequitur, which also flies in the face of the evidence, admitted by US officials themselves, that non-Iraqi Arabs have been infiltrating Iraq to commit acts of terror because of the US presence.

Sharon, similarly, says suicide bombings in Israel started before he took office. Does that mean he shares no blame? That is not the view of four former Israeli intelligence chiefs, who argued last week that Sharon's exclusive reliance on hardline responses has weakened Israel's security and increased the number of attacks on Israelis.

Before the war on Iraq several of Britain's intelligence experts, including senior officials, warned that it would increase the risk of terrorism and make British interests potential targets - a view shared by most critics of the war. To suggest they were wrong runs against common sense.

Coming after the war on Afghanistan, the war on Iraq has made al-Qaida's grisly work easier. Dispersed by American bombing from their remote mountain lairs, they have shifted to the much easier terrain of an urban Arab environment where they can be more readily hidden and helped. Resistance to US forces in southern and eastern Afghanistan as well as terrorist attacks on aid workers and other western soft targets are on the increase, but they appear to come from Afghan supporters of the former Taliban as well as other Pashtun radicals from Pakistan. Most Arabs who were in Afghanistan have moved to Iraq. There they have been joined by new Arab recruits, eager to add their energy to Iraq's local resistance.

In the long history of terrorism, al-Qaida has provided two novelties. One is its global reach, marked by willingness to strike targets in many countries. The other is its use of suicide attacks as a weapon of first, rather than last, resort. Under the broad heading of terrorism as a political and military instrument, suicide bombing is a sub-category, a technique within a technique.

In the post-colonial world its first proponents had nothing to do with the anti-Islamic myth that martyrs are motivated by the hope of being greeted by dozens of virgins waiting in heaven. It began with Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka, an act of martial self-sacrifice by angry women as well as men. When it spread to Palestine over the past decade, it was an act of last-resort desperation by frustrated people who saw no other way to counter Israel's disparity of power, as Cherie Blair once publicly pointed out. Al-Qaida has merely taken an old technique and made it the weapon of choice.

The shock this week is that Bush and Blair not only still believe that war is the way to deal with terrorists but that even when faced by the escalation of Istanbul they think victory is possible. The real issue is how to control risk. Anti-western extremism will never be eradicated, but it can be reduced by a combination of measures, primarily political.

The first is an early transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi people and the withdrawal of foreign forces. An arrangement whereby the new Iraqi government "requests" US troops to stay on will convince few in the Middle East. Second is firm and sustained pressure on Israel to make a deal with the Palestinians, presumably on the lines of the recent accord worked out in Geneva by Israeli and Palestinian dissidents.

There is no guaranteed defence against a suicide attack on a soft target. "Hardening" targets by turning every US or British building, at home or abroad, into a fortress makes little sense. It is better to try to reduce the motivations (hatred, revenge, or an overwhelming sense of injustice) that make people turn themselves into bombs. That endeavour will also never produce complete success. In Blair's misguided words, it cannot be done "utterly" or "once and for all". But it is the more productive way to go.

Playing Into Their Hands
Our "war" on terror breeds terrorists, and a vicious cycle of violence
By George Soros
(George Soros heads Soros Fund Management and is the founder of a global network of foundations dedicated to supporting open societies. His most recent book is "The Bubble of American Supremacy.")

The Bush administration is in the habit of waging personal vendettas against those who criticize its policies, but bit by bit the evidence is accumulating that the invasion of Iraq was among the worst blunders in U.S. history.
If the administration cannot recognize and admit its mistakes, it cannot correct its policies.

War is a false and misleading metaphor in the context of combating terrorism. The metaphor suited the purposes of the administration because it invoked our military might. But military actions require an identifiable target, preferably a state. As a result, the war on terrorism has been directed primarily against states like Afghanistan that are harboring terrorists, not at pursuing the terrorists themselves.

Imagine for a moment that Sept. 11 had been treated as a crime against humanity. We would have pursued Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan (hopefully with more success), but we would not have invaded Iraq. Nor would we today have our military struggling to perform police work in full combat gear, getting soldiers killed in the process.

This does not mean that we should not use military means to capture and bring terrorists to justice when appropriate. But to protect ourselves against terrorism, we need precautionary measures, awareness and intelligence gathering — all of which ultimately depend on the support of the populations among which terrorists operate.

Declaring war on the very people we need to enlist against terrorism is a huge mistake. We are bound to create some innocent victims, and the more of them there are, the greater the resentment and the better the chances that some victims will turn into the next perpetrators.

On Sept. 11, the United States was the victim of a heinous crime, and the whole world expressed spontaneous and genuine sympathy. Since then, though we Americans are loath to admit it, the war on terrorism has claimed more innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq than were lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The comparison is rarely made in the U.S.: American lives are valued differently from the lives of foreigners, but the distinction is less obvious to people abroad.

The war on terrorism as pursued by the Bush administration is more likely to bring about a permanent state of war than an end to terrorism. Terrorists are invisible; therefore, they will never disappear. They will continue to provide a convenient pretext for the pursuit of American supremacy by military means. That, in turn, will continue to generate resistance, setting up a vicious circle of escalating violence.

The important thing to remember about terrorism is that it is a reflexive phenomenon. Its impact and development depend on the actions and reactions of the victims. If the victims react by turning into perpetrators, terrorism triumphs in the sense of engendering more and more violence. That is what the fanatically militant Islamists who perpetrated the Sept. 11 attacks must have hoped to achieve. By allowing a "war" on terrorism to become our principal preoccupation, we are playing straight into the terrorists' hands: They — not we — are setting our priorities.

The United States is the most powerful country on Earth. While it cannot impose its will on the world, nothing much can be done in the way of international cooperation without its leadership or at least active participation.
The United States has a greater degree of discretion in deciding the shape of the world than anybody else. Other countries don't have a choice: They must respond to U.S. policy. This imposes a unique responsibility on the United States: Our nation must concern itself with the well-being of the world.

The United States is the only country that can take the lead in addressing problems that require collective action: preserving peace, assuring economic progress, protecting the environment and so on. Fighting terrorism and controlling weapons of mass destruction also fall into this category.

By using the war on terror as a pretext for asserting our military supremacy, we are embarking on an escalating spiral of terrorist/ counterterrorist violence. If instead we were to set an example of cooperative behavior, we could not only alleviate poverty, misery and injustice in the world, but also gain support for defending ourselves against terrorism. We will be the greatest beneficiaries if we do so.

Los Angeles Times (M1, April 4, 2004
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Since it's difficult to communicate to a mass audience the inevitably complex and usually debatable reasons for one nation's use of force against another, the leader of the enemy state must be used to stand for the entire nation and then demonized. Lasswell meant the term quite literally: The enemy leader must be portrayed as the incarnation of evil, the devil himself. Sound familiar? Just as Saddam Hussein became the personification of both Iraq and evil, so too was Kaiser Wilhelm used by Allied propagandists in World War I.

While the strategy of demonization is familiar to us, so too are the problems it creates once the war ends. If the cause of war is an evil leader, then his elimination should be the solution. Once that leader is dead or captured, problems faced by the victors as they attempt to reconstruct a shattered society are no easier to explain to Americans today than they were to the Allied populations in the wake of World War I.

Lasswell argued that to gain popular support for a war, it must always be portrayed as defensive. Claims about the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction or about connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden became the linchpins of our Iraq mobilization because they were central to portraying the U.S. invasion, without U.N. backing, not as an unprovoked attack, but as a defensive action necessitated by an evil enemy preparing to strike us.

Just as it was impossible for Allied governments to resist exaggerating claims of atrocities by German troops in neutral Belgium, a driving force behind claims of Iraqi WMD or connections to the terrorists of September 11, 2001, was their power to drum up public support. If we focus too closely on the accuracy of prewar intelligence estimates, we miss the more disturbing point that governments are simply unable to resist "cherry-picking" those estimates for use in propaganda.

Lasswell's analysis is even more prescient when it comes to the need for developing different propaganda appeals to different segments of the populace -- what we call segmenting, or "slicing and dicing," and wrongly take to be a new technique. Portrayal of an evil leader, guilty of unspeakable atrocities, possessing aggressive intent against one's country, works with the more jingoistic and aggressive segments of the population, Lasswell wrote, those who, he concluded, find "peace in war" and are labeled today as "Nascar dads" living in the "red" states.

Yet, he argued, there need to be as many different justifications for war as there are interests in the population. So, for example, more "sophisticated" middle-class intellectuals need appeals based on international law. In a discussion that anticipates the uses of the United Nations by the Bush administration, Lasswell argued that even if an international body (he had the League of Nations in mind) opposed your country's plans for war, that could be overcome by an argument that war was required by a "higher and truer" vision of international law, which international organizations failed to uphold.

But what of the long-run consequences when a government, once the war is over, is found to have manipulated the truth? Lasswell didn't think that was a problem, as long as your country won, since "victory required no explanation."

But victory is in the eye of the beholder. Can the continuing instability in Iraq, the violence, and the almost daily death and injuries inflicted on American troops be called victory? Whatever the long-term consequences, the Bush administration must feel an almost irresistible temptation to keep its time-table of turning authority over to an Iraqi government by June, declare victory, and hope that things don't fall apart until after the 2004 elections.

While the specific propaganda techniques developed in the early 20th century continue to be used, the context within which they are deployed has changed significantly. The rapid flow of information across borders makes it more difficult for governments to keep their populations long insulated from counterclaims and refutations.

Both the Blair and Bush administrations were quickly called to account over the basic premises they used to justify war. Unfortunately, that did not mean that the press provided an open and critical examination of the case for war before the conflict, when it would have done the most good.

While we pay much lip service to the idea of an aggressive press, in the run-up to war, journalists play a central role in propaganda campaigns by passing along the claims of their government with little criticism, or by acting as patriotic cheerleaders for war.

Depressingly, long-used propaganda techniques continue to be effective, but the price we pay is felt, in their wake, in the immediate backlash of cynicism and distrust of government. For example, one of the reasons (among many) that the Holocaust was not more widely covered in the American press, and used by the Roosevelt administration to buttress a case for war against Germany, was the suspicion that stories about the systematic extermination of Jews were just repeats of exaggerated World War I atrocity tales, and neither the press nor the public would allow themselves to be fooled again.

Similarly, I think it's unlikely that the Bush administration will launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran, Syria, or other members of the Axis of Evil (a phrase with deep roots in past propaganda campaigns). The greater problem may be that, even if Iran did pose a real and imminent nuclear threat, it would be exceedingly difficult to get a now-skeptical public to believe it.

We should question not the power of 80-year-old propaganda techniques -- their power seems indisputable -- but rather the need for them. Is the price they exact on public trust in government worth it? What sort of safeguards can be put in place against their use?

Those are some of the questions that need to be raised in the electoral-season debate over the war in Iraq. Clearly, fighting World War I or fascist aggression in the 1930s implied a total war and required total mobilization of the population. But invading a country like Iraq is hardly the same challenge as defeating a Nazi Germany that had conquered all of Western Europe.

When the United States is the world's pre-eminent military power, when wars are again fought by small professional volunteer armies, and domestic life is scarcely disrupted by conflict, the same blunt techniques used to mobilize for total war are simply not justifiable.

Strategically, because they portray conflict as a struggle for survival between good and evil, they make impossible any careful consideration of proportional military response in asymmetric conflicts. But more important, the toll they take on American democracy is too high.

Commonly, an analogy is defined as an "inference that if two or more things agree with one another in some respects they will prob. agree in others"; or " a resemblance in some particulars between things otherwise unlike"; "a similarity; a comparison based on such resemblance."

Using terms from the Intensify/Downplay schema, an analogy would intensify similarities(e.g. long, draining, guerilla war), but downplay differences (e.g. wider effects on the Islamic world).

Logically, rationally, if metaphors are fully extended into an analogy, they're almost certain to be criticized, correctly, as being faulty analogies because no two things or situations are ever exactly alike.

Thus, the "war on terrorism"-- often used by administration -- if fully extended would be a logical faulty analogy. But also, the "Vietnam quagmire" analogy --often used by administration critics -- would also be a logical faulty analogy.

Emotionally, however, faulty analogies, non-rational as they may be, are often used by persuaders because the are effective. They transfer the emotional associations of one thing to another.

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"Bush with a Gerson text sounds a lot better than Bush on his own," says Theodore Sorensen, speechwriter for Jack Kennedy, and someone whose writing talents Gerson truly admires.
He puts words in Bush's mouth
Presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson
By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY April 10, 2001 | See also: Bush’s loyal speechwriter.

WASHINGTON — The Sam Seaborn of the real West Wing is not, as creators of the popular NBC series would have it, as "equally skilled with the ladies" as he is with presidential prose. President Bush's speechwriter Michael Gerson, by contrast, married the girl he took piano lessons with back in junior high. Nor does the real-life White House wordsmith have the chiseled features, Ivy League pedigree and Armani polish of his TV counterpart. Gerson, 36, is a Brooks Brothers kind of guy, who studied theology in a small Midwestern college and is more reminiscent of Woody Allen than Rob Lowe in the glamour department.

He chews up uni-ball pens by the packet, scribbling out Bush's most acclaimed speeches in longhand on a yellow legal pad. He sometimes takes days to produce a first draft. And he does some of his best writing in the nearest Starbucks, where his muse is the largest latte on the menu and the ambient noise of an espresso machine. When he was crafting Bush's inaugural address, he waited in pre-dawn darkness for the coffee shop to open at 5:30 a.m. near his home in Alexandria, Va. (The real West Wing speechwriter's office is a windowless room in the basement.)

"I'm actually a terrible speller," Gerson says, further tacking from the TV image. His wife, Dawn, laughs at the Seaborn comparison. "I tease him," she says.

But heartthrob or not, Gerson has done more for Bush's ratings than an Oval Office full of Rob Lowes could do for The West Wing.
In Bush's arduous journey from earning credibility as a candidate to legitimacy as president, three speeches boosted him and won high marks from friend and foe. Each — his nomination acceptance speech in August, inaugural in January and address to Congress in February — was first drafted by Gerson, who later huddled with Bush and Karen Hughes, now counselor to the president, to revise and polish.

Suddenly, this evangelical Christian — with his owlish, horn-rimmed spectacles, and love of Monty Python humor and Chinese mysteries by Robert Hans Van Gulik — is the Mark McGwire of speechwriting.

"Remarkably deft, coherently organized, competently written and ingeniously crafted," The New Yorker magazine says of those major speeches. "Michael Gerson ... is three for three."

Newspaper opinion writers across America, and the political spectrum, describe the 15-minute inaugural as brilliant, impassioned, graceful and powerful. The New York Times calls it "the most eloquent speech of (Bush's) life." And Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. labels Gerson "his party's best wordsmith when it comes to describing the struggles of the poor and the obligations of citizens to share each other's burdens."

Bush's nickname for Gerson is The Scribe. Before writing a major speech, Gerson captures presidential thoughts on a small, handheld Sony tape recorder. In preparing for the inaugural, his questions to Bush about legacy produced that speech's four themes: courage, compassion, civility and character.

He paces in his office while reading first drafts out loud. To "feel the history," he pored through all 53 inaugural addresses. ("Some of them are eminently forgettable," Gerson says.)

He is a true adherent of Bush's compassionate conservatism, who finds his writing inspiration in the moral intensity of speeches by John and Bobby Kennedy, and the civil rights movement. "I'm an extraordinary fan of Martin Luther King," Gerson says. "He had that rare ability to take a moment and place it in the context of our whole history."

An inveterate reader, Gerson squirrels away quotes that might ornament a speech, gems both lyrical and obscure. One was by Declaration of Independence signer John Page to Thomas Jefferson during the American Revolution: "Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?"

Gerson wrote it into the ending of Bush's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, but it got cut. He tried again in the inaugural. "I knew Mike really felt strongly about (it)," Hughes says. "I remember telling him, 'It's perfect for this speech.' "
It stayed, and Gerson echoed the phrase in crafting the speech's denouement. The inaugural, with its imagery of American democracy as a "seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations"; a shared concern "in the quiet of American conscience" for the poor; and a call for citizens "to seek a common good beyond your comfort," is the speechwriter's proudest effort.

"Gerson is very talented," says Michael Waldman, formerly Clinton's chief scribe, "and seems to have a core of decency that shines through in his speeches."

"Bush with a Gerson text sounds a lot better than Bush on his own," says Theodore Sorensen, speechwriter for Jack Kennedy, and someone whose writing talents Gerson truly admires.

There's a nervous energy about the Bush speechwriter. During an interview in a Starbucks near the White House, where he works part of each day, Gerson tortures a stirring stick, twisting it into a napkin while trying to characterize his job.

"Let me put it this way. On most days in most circumstances, you are writing for the next day's headlines. In a few moments, you are writing for American history. And that's a tremendous honor," Gerson says. "And then there may come a time, once or twice, when you are writing for the angels. For some great and decisive moment."

There was a time when presidential speechwriters were the redheaded stepchildren, kept in the closet lest they mar the charade that the president penned his own prose. That changed with the rising image of Reagan-Bush writer Peggy Noonan. Waldman sat for major profiles near the end of Clinton's tenure.

But Bush made Gerson available to the media right out of the box, uncommon candor particularly for a president whose tortured syntax is so often the stuff of late-night comedy. Karen Hughes explains the administration's straightforwardness about Gerson with: "We're from Texas." But she also quarrels with the notion that Bush isn't capable of his own eloquence.

"The president's natural style is what I call eloquent simplicity," Hughes says.

"Mike is able to challenge the president ... to more poetic heights," she says. "Mike deserves a great deal of credit."

Gerson once wrote a crucial address to the Christian Coalition for Steve Forbes that won the magazine publisher accolades and support. Receiving a first draft of a Gerson speech, Forbes says, is "delicious. You roll the phrases off your tongue."

"Mike gets these wonderful phrases. It's like music in his head," says Watergate figure Charles Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, who hired Gerson as a staff writer in 1986.

Born in New Jersey, Gerson grew up in St. Louis, where he met his wife — a Korean native adopted by an American family — at the church they attended. The couple today have two boys, Bucky, 6 and Nicholas, 3. Gerson's father, who died in 1992, was a dairy scientist and maker of ice cream flavors. His mother, Betty, is an artist.

Gerson was studying theology at Wheaton College near Chicago when someone sent Colson a college newspaper column Gerson had written on Mother Teresa (a favorite Gerson icon, she surfaces again in Bush's inaugural) and Colson hired him right after graduation. Gerson later became policy director for then-U.S. Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), taking time out to act as policy adviser to Jack Kemp and write speeches for Bob Dole.

"He has an almost uncanny quality," Coats says, "an ability to sit and talk and think aloud with you. And translate your thoughts and conclusions and recommendations into a document that seems to express it even better than you expressed it."
Gerson was working as a writer for U.S. News & World Report when Bush interviewed him for 45 minutes in 1999 and offered him a campaign job on the spot.

Bush is an active editor, says Gerson, who likes tight writing and shorter speeches. When he drafted a 1999 Bush speech critical of Republicans who see America as "slouching toward Gomorrah" on social issues, a conservative firestorm ensued. Many thought it a brazen attack on former jurist Robert Bork and his 1996 book on American moral decay: Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Editorial writers for The Wall Street Journal even suggested that Bush, not known as a book reader, didn't recognize the veiled reference to Bork's book. (Gerson says today that he didn't point out the connection to Bush.)

Gerson was stunned and demoralized by the onslaught, but profoundly impressed when Bush called him twice, leaving a five-minute message on an answering machine, to reassure and console.

"He's a genuinely decent guy," Gerson says. "He knows how to build loyalty by showing loyalty."

Today, Gerson is busy hiring the last of five staff speechwriters and is beginning work on the next set of major Bush addresses — a series of commencement speeches for May and June.

And as for The West Wing, he doesn't watch it. (He's seen the fantasy about a Democratic president maybe twice.)
"I guess I never thought I'd have a job that people would want to see on television."

© Copyright 2004 USA TODAY | Top

THE BELIEVER
George W. Bush’s loyal speechwriter.
by JEFFREY GOLDBERG | The New Yorker | Feb 13/20, 2006

The Judson Welliver Society is a bipartisan, sporadically serious, and generally impious club of ex-White House speechwriters. Its founder and president-for-life is the former Times columnist William Safire, who once wrote speeches for Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. Welliver, a former newspaperman, was the first “literary clerk” ever to be placed on the White House payroll; he wrote speeches for the subcompetent Warren G. Harding and the ineloquent Calvin Coolidge. The members of the society that carries his nearly forgotten name get together every year or so to remind one another of the maddening yet elating experience of watching the most powerful men on earth rewrite their otherwise perfect sentences.

The December, 2002, meeting of the Welliver Society took place at the headquarters of the Motion Picture Association of America, two blocks from the White House. Jack Valenti, the former Lyndon Johnson aide, who was then the M.P.A.A. chairman, provided his dining room for free, which is crucial to any gathering of writers, especially those with money. In attendance that night were writers who had served every President since Harry S. Truman, including Theodore Sorensen, who wrote for John F. Kennedy, and much of the recently decommissioned Clinton speechwriting team. White House speechwriters on active service are not offered membership in the Society, but they are invited to the dinner, mostly to be put on the spot. So there was a good deal of anticipation when it came time for Michael Gerson, then President Bush’s chief speechwriter, to address the group. By 2002, it had become the cross-party consensus that Gerson was almost Sorensen’s equal in skill and rhetorical ambition. (“George W. Bush’s first week as President of the United States began with a speech that, taken as a whole and judged purely as a piece of writing, was shockingly good,” Hendrik Hertzberg, a former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter and not a Bush enthusiast, wrote in this magazine in January of 2001.) Gerson has provided Bush with striking expressions, such as “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” to describe how prejudicial perceptions affect minority students, and his invocation of the American dream, in June, 1999, when then Governor Bush announced his candidacy:

The success of America has never been proven by cities of gold, but by citizens of character. Men and women who work hard, dream big, love their family, serve their neighbor. Values that turn a piece of earth into a neighborhood, a community, a chosen nation.

Unlike most speechwriters, who tend to be segregated from policymaking, Gerson has always been an influential figure in the White House, in part because he shares Bush’s belief in the power of faith—both men are evangelical Christians—and because he possesses a preternatural ability, his friends say, to anticipate Bush’s thinking. There is a “mind meld” between the two men, Bush’s counsellor Dan Bartlett told me, adding, “When you bring a West Texas approach to the heavy debates of the world, there has to be a translator, and Mike is the translator.”

Gerson is known to his friends for his pre-ironic sensibility, and for his soft heart; I once saw him close to tears when he spoke about AIDS patients in Uganda. But he is also a capable operator. In 2002, a senior White House official told me, Gerson outflanked Dick Cheney, who didn’t want Bush to declare unambiguously his support for a Palestinian state, as Gerson had urged him to do—and as Bush did, in a speech that Gerson wrote. Gerson is also unashamedly guileless in his search for heroes; when he came to Washington, in the late nineteen-eighties, he would sometimes park outside the home of George F. Will, hoping to catch a glimpse of the conservative columnist. And, even in the Bush White House, he is known for his piety. On display in his office is a book called “Standing in the Need of Prayer,” photographs of African-Americans praying. He told the National Journal’s Carl Cannon, last year, that the book “moved me no end.” Cannon then noted, as if in wonderment, “Gerson really speaks this way.”

At a Welliver dinner, the remarks of ex-speechwriters tend toward carefully calibrated irreverence; current speechwriters aren’t expected to gripe or to disclose confidences. But at the 2002 event, Gerson spoke with immoderate earnestness. According to several people who attended, Safire asked Gerson to tell the group something it didn’t know about Bush. Gerson, in a quavering voice, responded with a story that left some of his audience nonplussed. He described a call that he got moments after Bush finished addressing a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001. Bush thanked Gerson for his work on the speech, to which Gerson replied, “Mr. President, this is why God wants you here.” Gerson then related Bush’s response, as evidence of his thoughtfulness. “The President said, ‘No, this is why God wants us here.’ ”

An uncomfortable silence filled the room, and then one of Bill Clinton’s speechwriters said, in a stage whisper, “God must really hate Al Gore.”

Gerson knows that he is an enigma to the liberal establishment of Washington. He is a churchgoing, anti-gay-marriage, pro-life supply-sider who believes absolutely in the corporeality of Jesus’ resurrection. He is also supremely loyal to an ideological President in a city that tends to grant only posthumous approbation to ideologues, particularly conservative ones. Yet among his role models he counts Martin Luther King, Jr., and the radical evangelical abolitionists of the nineteenth century, and his chief vocational preoccupation is the battle against infectious disease in Africa. He has won the admiration of many AIDS and debt-relief activists, including the U2 singer Bono, who, in an e-mail, said, “Mike is known as a ‘moral compass’ at the White House. Seems like that compass keeps pointing him in the direction of Africa,” where Gerson has “obviously left a part of himself.” He is popular with reporters, perhaps because he was once one himself, at U.S. News & World Report. He has a self-deprecating manner that the Washington press corps is surprised to find in the Bush White House. “Mike has his own consistencies that defy the normal consistencies in our politics,” E. J. Dionne, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for the Washington Post, said. “For Mike, it’s thoroughly consistent to be pro-life and to work for poor people in Africa.”

Gerson also baffles many Republicans. Unlike the libertarian wing of the Party, he says that the government has a moral duty to help the poor. When Bush, in his first Presidential campaign, criticized small-government Republicanism as “an approach with no higher goal, no nobler purpose than ‘Leave us alone,’ ” the head of the Cato Institute suggested that Bush’s speechwriter was moonlighting for Hillary Clinton.

Gerson defends Bush’s tax cuts, which the President’s critics believe not only favor those with the highest incomes but have also left less money for important domestic programs; Gerson believes that free markets and free trade are the best means of lifting people out of poverty, and that lower taxes stimulate both. “The part of Mike I have the most trouble understanding, perhaps because we simply disagree, is how he can square his support for pretty substantial spending for the very poorest among us with a defense of Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest people,” Dionne said. “Maybe Mike just buys supply-side economics in a way that I don’t, but most supply-siders don’t think like Mike.”

Jim Towey, who directs the White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, which steers government funds to religious groups that provide social services, explained Gerson’s role in the Bush Administration this way: “There are some people in the White House who are more conservative than compassionate, and some who are more compassionate than conservative. Mike is more compassionate than conservative.”

Gerson’s role as protector of “compassionate conservatism” was evident during a meeting in the first term with Bush and his advisers, who were discussing a proposal to spend fifteen billion dollars to combat AIDS in Africa. According to Dan Bartlett, Bush went around the room and then asked, “What do you think, Gerson?” (“The President just calls him Gerson,” Joshua Bolten, the White House budget chief, told me. “Mike isn’t the sort of guy who lends himself to silly nicknames.”) Bartlett said that Gerson answered with typical bluntness: “The bottom line is that we’re the richest nation in history, and history will judge us severely if we don’t do this.” The room went quiet. Then Bush said, “That’s Gerson being Gerson.”

Although the program’s implementation has been sclerotic and not without controversy (critics have faulted it for emphasizing abstinence over condom use), the Administration now spends far more each year to combat AIDS in Africa than the Clinton Administration did. Bolten, a friend of Gerson’s, recalled another meeting, in December, 2004, about domestic-spending cuts. There was a skirmish that day between Bolten and Gerson, but neither can remember the details, mainly because Gerson suffered a mild heart attack early the next morning. He was rushed into surgery, and had two coronary stents implanted in his chest. A few hours later, Gerson sent Bolten an e-mail from the intensive-care unit: “I told you that budget was too extreme and shocking. I couldn’t take it.”

Even before the heart attack, Gerson, who is forty-one, was not a picture of stout good health. He is slight of stature and his skin has a tendency to shade gray, as one might expect of someone who spends his life sequestered in the White House, or in a nearby Starbucks, where he frequently writes speeches. Many of Gerson’s friends thought that he would quit after the coronary, but Bush asked Gerson to become a senior policy adviser, and he moved to a first-floor West Wing office, two doors down from the Oval Office. While he would still play a role in Bush’s speeches, Gerson was told to focus on Africa policy, on democracy in the Middle East, and on domestic social programs, including faith-based initiatives—in short, to be the advocate for such goals.

Before he took on this new role, though, Gerson—with his first-term writing partners, Matthew Scully and John McConnell—wrote the speech that is perhaps the best summation of Bush’s ideology, the second Inaugural, in which Bush said, “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.” Like many Gerson speeches, the second Inaugural was steeped in the language of faith—and contained utopian promises that will be difficult to fulfill. In that way, it highlighted, perhaps inadvertently, the distance between rhetoric and accomplishment in the Bush Presidency.

Gerson is aware that Bush’s reputation hinges on the outcome of the Iraq war, and one day in his office we spoke about the Administration’s audacious goal of democratizing the Middle East. When I suggested that Bush might live to a great old age and never see the disappearance of totalitarianism in the region, he demurred, saying, “I think in three years this will be seen differently.”

Gerson’s office is windowless, and evidence of his writerly quirks could be seen on his desk, which was littered with violently chewed pen caps and legal pads that were dark with illegible scribbling. Gerson’s fidgeting is a source of amusement to his friends; they speak of occasions when he gnawed through pens, leaving his mouth filled with blue ink. At one point in our conversation, he rubbed his eyes so ferociously that I feared he would detach a retina. “I’m a worrier,” he said. “I put a lot of pressure on myself. I know people think it’s funny, but these aren’t charming eccentricities. When I had my heart attack, my doctor was very clear that I had to find a different way to work, without putting so much pressure on myself.”

The West Wing is no place for tranquil thought, especially as Bush tries to revive his Presidency. Gerson conceded that the current moment is a complicated and testing one for the White House, but he pointed out that Bush had predicted it in his speech of September 20, 2001. “You have a section where the President says, in essence, ‘Over time, life’s going to go back to normal for all of you, but it’s not going back to normal for me,’ ” Gerson said, quoting Bush quoting himself. “Now, that was written assuming that we didn’t have twenty more attacks, and for the first few months afterward we were expecting daily attacks. We had even worked on a set of remarks for a follow-up attack.” Gerson argued that the “successful protection of the American people reduces the sense of urgency on these questions of terrorism.”

When I asked Gerson about the recent domestic-spying controversy, he replied, almost irritably, “These are the appropriate constitutional and necessary methods to defend American liberty.” He added, “The President views us as at war, and he’d much rather be on that side of things than have to apologize after an attack. I don’t want to write any more ‘days of national mourning’ speeches.”

Gerson, like others in the Bush White House, seems to regard the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as somewhat beside the point, but he noted that Bush has now admitted the obvious—that the war has not gone as predicted. “I know that some of my decisions have led to terrible loss—and not one of those decisions has been taken lightly,” Bush said in an Oval Office speech in December that was written by Gerson. “I know this war is controversial, yet being your President requires doing what I believe is right and accepting the consequences.” Bush did not signal ambivalence, or a change of tactics, but the confessional tone, Gerson said, helped people to hear his argument for war in a new way. “We gained the ability to do the pushback by being realistic on the ground.”

In December, the Washington Post reported that some senior White House staff members, including Bush’s political adviser, Karl Rove, opposed this provisionally candid approach, but Gerson said Bush felt that he couldn’t respond because of the “unbelievable partisanship” of the Democrats, and because of the press of events—most notably, Hurricane Katrina, which last August destroyed much of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Gerson told me, in an uncharacteristic burst of spin, “It’s amazing how much Katrina dominated the White House staff in terms of time, effort, and energy and emotion.”

In fact, few believed that Bush demonstrated much leadership throughout the Hurricane Katrina crisis; when the storm made landfall he was on vacation, in Crawford, Texas, and seemingly detached from daily events. His encouraging words to Michael Brown, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (“Brownie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job!”), have become a comedic cliché. Bush did not, however, fail oratorically. In a speech from New Orleans two weeks after the hurricane struck, he said, “The people of this land have come back from fire, flood, and storm to build anew—and to build better than what we had before. Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature—and we will not start now.”

The words, which were Gerson’s, were seen as hollow against the chaotic backdrop of the federal government’s response. Gerson, though, argues for the importance of choosing the right language in a crisis: “In times of national grief, the words really do matter. And, in times of focussing national purpose, the words really do matter.” So it was with the second Inaugural. “I think the President believes that one role of his is to be practical, realistic, and effective, but he also believes that he has a second, and maybe more important, role, to set out an ideal,” Gerson said. “The President’s view is that one of the great soft-power advantages of the United States of America is that we can imagine a different and better world, that we are unique because we are not defined by race or tradition but by a set of universal ideals.” Bush’s critics, Gerson continued, lack historical perspective. “This is not some Don Quixote thing for the President. This is an odd time to be skeptical about the advance of freedom, given the advances we’ve made over the past fifty years. There are three billion people now who live in democratic countries.” Gerson went on to quote Martin Luther King: “ ‘The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.’ I believe that deeply.”

Gerson frames issues in stark moral terms. The three most famous words he has ever set to paper are “axis of evil,” a phrase referring to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that made its first appearance in the 2002 State of the Union Message. A speechwriter then on Gerson’s team, David Frum, had proposed “axis of hatred,” but, according to Frum, Gerson substituted “evil” for its more theological resonance. “Evil exists, and it has to be confronted,” Gerson told me.

Twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Soviet political prisoners later said that the words gave them hope, but the foreign-policy realists associated with the Presidency of Bush’s father believed, and still do, that the expression was inflammatory and unwise. As a speechwriter, Gerson said, his conscience is, literally, his guide. “When we’re dealing with these questions, it always occurs to me, How would people who are living in that evil experience it?” he said. “How would exiles, and prisoners, and the families of the dead describe it? Now, that’s an element of realism. Are you going to take their side or not? When you talk about women being beheaded in soccer stadiums, or women being stoned for adultery, how would they experience it? I think asking this question is a form of realism.” He continued, “I think one of the ways Presidents and governments and civilizations are viewed is whether they side with this moral reality or not.”

Yet Bush and his Administration have sometimes stood with the autocrats—as in China, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. The experiment in Iraq is not without hope, but it is a testament to the limitations of nation-building—and to the limitations of the Bush Administration’s designated nation-builders. All speechwriters create an ideal character of the Presidents they serve, but the actual Bush has now and then been eclipsed by Gerson’s idea of Bush, and not only in foreign policy. What is perhaps Gerson’s most extraordinary speech for Bush was a consideration of the legacy of slavery in America. Bush delivered it in 2003, at a former slave-trading station in Senegal:

The spirit of Africans in America did not break. Yet the spirit of their captors was corrupted. Small men took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters. Years of unpunished brutality and bullying and rape produced a dullness and hardness of conscience. Christian men and women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith and added hypocrisy to injustice. A republic founded on equality for all became a prison for millions. And yet, in the words of the African proverb, “no fist is big enough to hide the sky.” All the generations of oppression under the laws of man could not crush the hope of freedom and defeat the purposes of God.

These words had no discernible effect on Bush’s relations with AfricanAmericans, which could hardly have been worse, and the speech was never given much attention. Gerson acknowledged that the federal response to Hurricane Katrina has not helped the relationship between Bush and black America. He said that he had hoped the storm “would open a larger debate on poverty and race in America. But the Republican leadership in Congress has not shown an interest in that. This has exposed something we eventually have to confront.” Gerson said that African-Americans might like Bush if they knew him better. “The President I know is a very tolerant man,” he told me. “The President I know is a very compassionate man.”

When Gerson was brought into the room, Bush, who had read his earlier work, asked just one question: “Mike, did you write these speeches?” Gerson said yes. Bush said, “If this is your work, this is what I want.” Gerson doesn’t recollect the anxiety attack, but he remembers feeling that he had found in Bush an ideal President.

The person whom Gerson first saw as an ideal President, though, was Jimmy Carter. Gerson’s father, an ice-cream maker, was a Republican, but his mother was a Kennedy Democrat, and in high school, in St. Louis (the family moved there from New Jersey when Gerson was ten), Gerson, precociously political, became a Carter supporter. To Gerson, whose parents were evangelical Christians (his last name comes from a Jewish grandfather), Carter’s candid evangelicalism was thrilling. “He was very straightforward about his beliefs,” Gerson said. “It was very exciting.” He recalled Carter’s embarrassment after telling Playboy that he had committed “adultery in my heart.” Secular America found it amusing, but the expression, which came from the Sermon on the Mount, resonated with religious Christians.
Gerson still admires Carter, a furious critic of the Bush Administration, and many other Democrats as well. One day, I asked him to name his favorite Presidents. He immediately placed Franklin D. Roosevelt at the top of the list. “I have gained a new respect for him in my five years in the White House, for his moral clarity and firmness,” Gerson said. I asked him if he appreciated F.D.R.’s frank use of Christian imagery—after all, F.D.R. often referred to the war with Germany as a battle between the Cross and the swastika. Gerson laughed. “We would never use language like that to the extent he did,” he said. Also on Gerson’s list were Truman, Kennedy, and, “for his vision of democracy,” Woodrow Wilson. Finally, he admitted a Republican. “Reagan, to some extent,” he said, “for the recognition of a moral dimension of foreign policy.”

When I asked Gerson why, then, he wasn’t a Democrat, he replied that the Party had left him—in particular on the issue of abortion. In 1980, he presented Carter’s positions in a mock debate at his Christian high school, but, he recalled, “in the vote afterward it might have just been me for him.” By 1984, he was campaigning for Reagan, who was running against Walter Mondale. “In college, I was becoming very active in the pro-life cause, and there was no room for our position,” he said. “The Democratic Party, in many ways, abandoned its great tradition of caring for the weakest members of our society. It has elevated a philosophy of choice and individual autonomy above the needs of the unborn, the handicapped, and, on the question of euthanasia, the elderly. These are the very people I thought the Democratic Party should care about.” (Carter likes Gerson’s writing, but told me that it was a “gross exaggeration” to say that the Democratic Party made itself hostile to anti-abortion activists when he was President. “Tell Gerson he’s welcome to come back to the Party, if he wants,” Carter said.)

Gerson attended Georgetown University for a year, but transferred, in 1983, to Wheaton College, an evangelical school near Chicago. In 1985, he wrote a column for the Wheaton College newspaper in praise of Mother Teresa for her commitment to “the poor and the helpless unborn” and, notably, to AIDS patients. The column was written long before AIDS became an issue of general Christian concern, and it was noticed far from campus. Charles Colson read it and invited Gerson to work for him in Washington at the prison ministry he started after his release from jail, where he served a sentence for his role in the Watergate scandal. After that, Gerson went to work as a writer and adviser to Dan Coats, the U.S. senator from Indiana, who was looking at ways to interest conservatives in issues of poverty. During the 1996 Presidential campaign, Gerson wrote speeches for Forbes and Dole, and then went to work for U.S. News. Steven Waldman, the founder of the religion-oriented Web site Beliefnet.com, was Gerson’s editor at U.S. News, where his main journalistic interest, Waldman said, was the world of charities. “Mike was very curious to find out what actually worked” to bring people out of poverty.

Gerson is close in spirit to neo-evangelicalism, which grew up in opposition to Protestant fundamentalism, and to Catholic social teaching, which urges greater engagement in the suffering of the world. “Gerson represents a wholly new thing,” Michael Cromartie, the vice-president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a right-of-center think tank in Washington, said. Cromartie, who has studied the role of evangelicals in public life, believes that the first generation of evangelical activists became fixated on a narrow set of conflict-ridden issues, mainly abortion and gay marriage. “Many of the things that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson say are contrary to the very core of the Christian message, which is about forgiveness, grace, and charity, not condemnation,” Cromartie said, and added, “Michael is very much focussed on the command to love your neighbor, and that means working on poverty, but, unlike Protestant liberals, he does not automatically equate this commandment with increased federal spending.”

Gerson’s life is built around prayer and faith, and so, too, are his speeches. Bush has been criticized for his regular invocations of God, but in that respect he is part of a long tradition. Bill Clinton often invoked the Deity, even referring, on occasion, to Jesus. (Bush frequently mentions “the Almighty,” and “the Creator,” but a close reading of his speeches shows them to be scrupulous in their nonsectarianism.) “The President can’t imagine that someone who is President of the United States could not have faith, because he derives so much from it,” Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, said. “I can see him struggle with other world leaders who don’t appear to be grounded in some faith,” he said. He added, “The President doesn’t care what faith it is, as long as it’s faith.” (Card also called Gerson “a C. S. Lewis type,” adding, “I don’t want you to think that we’re a bunch of amoral people running around here and finally Mike Gerson comes along and sets us right.”) Gerson says that he is flummoxed by the debate over religiosity in the White House. “There’s an idea that we are constantly trying to sneak into the President’s speeches religious language, code words, that only our supporters understand,” he said. “But they are code words only if you don’t know them, and most people know them.”

To illustrate his point, Gerson reminded me about the Times’ coverage of Bush’s first campaign. In April of 2000, after one Bush appearance, Frank Bruni wrote, “Mr. Bush also offered an interesting variation on the saying about the pot and the kettle. ‘Don’t be takin’ a speck out of your neighbor’s eye,’ he told the audience, ‘when you got a log in your own.’ ” Bush, in his inimitable way, was actually making reference to a saying of Jesus, quoted in Matthew: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” Gerson, smiling, said, “No one at the Times seemed to know that these were the words of the Sermon on the Mount.”

But Bush’s reliance on the language of faith has led some to wonder whether he seeks comfort or actual political guidance from Scripture. Peggy Noonan, a speechwriter for President Reagan and the first President Bush, has criticized the second Inaugural, in particular the assertion that America’s “ultimate goal” is “ending tyranny in the world,” and suggested that the perfection of an imperfect world might better be left to God. “Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn’t expect we’re going to eradicate it any time soon,” she wrote in the Wall Street Journal, adding, “This is not heaven, it’s earth.”

Gerson told me that Bush finds no policy prescriptions in Christianity, but he believes that God’s desires helped to shape the ideas at the core of the second Inaugural. “The President’s views about the universal appeal of liberty come in part from the fact that he is kind of marinated in the American ideal,” Gerson said. “They come in part from a view that human beings are created in the image of God and will not forever suffer the oppressor’s sword, that eventually there’s something deep in the human soul that cries out for freedom. That doesn’t mean he believes that God blesses this particular foreign policy or that particular foreign policy.”

I once asked Gerson to describe the role that the Sermon on the Mount plays in his own life, and in Bush’s life. (The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr calls the Sermon an “impossible ethical ideal” for human behavior.) “The Gospel stands in judgment of all human institutions and ideologies. It’s not identical with any one of them,” Gerson said. There is a danger, though, in “proof-texting”—searching the Bible for policy instruction. “You can’t find the justification for anti-sodomy laws in the Book of Matthew,” he said. “There is this idea that you can know what Jesus would think about missile defense or S.U.V.s, but it’s wrong. . . . I don’t have any moral qualms about saying that free-market economics are the single best way to take millions of people out of poverty that the world has ever seen,” but he added that he didn’t learn this from the Bible.

He said that the Sermon’s influence on his writing, and on Bush’s thinking, is far more profound than its influence on mere policy. Bush’s vision of democratic universalism owes much to Wilson, and Jefferson. But Gerson suggests that Bush is sure of his path because God is the God of justice. He even suggests that Bush’s leadership style—and his oratorical ambitions—are informed by the example of Jesus. “The ideal that’s set out in the Book of Matthew is a high one,” Gerson told me, “and the Sermon on the Mount has played an extraordinarily challenging role in the history of the world. And you notice that it didn’t have a realist, pragmatic understanding of what is possible. So maybe this is an attribute of leadership, to help imagine a different world.”

Imagining a different world is not the same as engineering it, and Peggy Noonan is not the only conservative to have detected a whiff of messianism in Bush’s vision. In a column last year, George Will noted that, in the Cold War, “the survival of liberty meant the containment of tyranny. Now, Bush says, the survival of liberty must involve the expansion of liberty until ‘our world’ is scrubbed clean of tyranny.” Speaking about Iraq, Gerson’s own pastor, the Reverend John Yates, told me that he “had a hard time justifying this war, but I was so torn internally that I didn’t speak out publicly.” Yates is the rector of the Falls Church, an evangelical Episcopal church in a Virginia suburb that takes its name from the church. The Falls Church has a venerable history—George Washington was once a warden there—and today it counts among its parishioners the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, and several Republican members of Congress. Yates praised Gerson as a devoted worshipper who is at church each Sunday morning with his wife, Dawn, who works on Capitol Hill for a Republican congressman, and their two young sons.
“Michael is a person of high morality,” Yates said, adding that he understands Gerson’s attraction to Bush. “The President’s vision of spreading democracy is a wonderful, noble vision, and I’m glad he has it, and I’m glad he has Michael. It’s just that often we Americans get into a situation where we find that we’re not nearly so knowledgeable about the world as we thought we were. Americans seem to be particularly vulnerable to that. Are there people who are not ready for democracy? I hope and pray that people are, but I don’t know.”

Gerson drafted much of last month’s State of the Union Message, sharing the work with John McConnell and the new chief of speechwriting, William McGurn. The speech had its moments—for instance, the tribute to Coretta Scott King—but it was more quotidian than inspiring, and the next morning I found Gerson in a somewhat deflated mood. “It’s always a letdown after a speech,” he said. It makes him nervous to attend the event in the House chamber; on the night of the speech, “fidgeting on the couch,” he watched at home. “I met a playwright who couldn’t watch his plays,” Gerson said, by way of explanation.
He thought that Bush gave an excellent performance—“He looked like he was enjoying himself”—but was surprised that lines he expected to win an ovation were greeted with silence. “We had two paragraphs on foreign aid, about the compassion of America, which is unusual for a Presidential speech, and there was no applause,” he said. “I don’t know—it could be a bad applause line, or it could be a sign that foreign assistance doesn’t sell. It happens.”

The speech contained several mentions of “compassion.” When I suggested to Gerson that there were few ideas to match the sentiment, he disagreed. “There’s seventy million dollars to provide more money for people waiting” for AIDS drugs, he said. “There’s ninety million for about three million rapid H.I.V. tests, where we’re going to focus on the prison population and on I.V.-drug users.” But, he went on, “we’re living in a different budgetary situation than we were in 2003, when the President could announce a fifteen-billion-dollar AIDS initiative, and that’s just a reality. There’s nothing that anyone can do about that, and I can’t change that.”

Nor did Bush say much about faith-based programs, to which even some conservatives have argued that the Administration is insufficiently committed. David Kuo, the former deputy director of the White House program, wrote on Beliefnet.com last year that, when Bush won the Presidency, “there was every reason to believe he’d be not only pro-life and pro-family, as conservatives tended to be, but also pro-poor, which was daringly radical. After all, there were specific promises he intended to keep.” But politics stood in the way, Kuo said, and funding disappeared. “Who was going to hold them accountable? Drug addicts, alcoholics, poor moms, struggling urban social-service organizations, and pastors aren’t quite the N.R.A.” Kuo quit in 2003, in frustration; his predecessor, John DiIulio, has also said that the program had been politicized. Gerson pointed out that Bush promised “twenty-five million dollars for African-American churches and faith-based institutions to do H.I.V./AIDS awareness.” When I noted that the amount seemed slight, Gerson said, somewhat apologetically, “It’s a start.”

Gerson said that he finds backing for his altruistic concerns throughout the Administration—he named Josh Bolten and Karl Rove as allies. Privately, though, he has told friends that he occasionally feels that Bush is his only ally. On such issues as the Iraq war, which occupied a large portion of the State of the Union address, Gerson, like Bush, has never wavered. “The people of the Middle East are not exceptions to this great trend of history, and, by standing up for these things, we are on the right side of history,” he said.

I once asked Gerson whether he believed that God put George W. Bush in the White House in order to defeat tyranny. “It’s a basic evangelical truth that God is interested in our lives and guides us,” Gerson replied. “Just because God’s hand was guiding us doesn’t mean that he’s not guiding other people. It’s not exclusive. It’s just a sense that God is at work in your life, that things happen for a reason.” He also believes that God has a plan for him. His heart attack, which might have scared others into semiretirement, helped him focus on important things—his family, most notably, and his work, he said. “God gave me a set of talents, and I want to use them to do what is right.”
Copyright 2006 | The New Yorker | Issue of February 13, 2006

WAR AND WORDS
by Hendrik Hertzberg | The New Yorker | Comment | February 13, 2006

A President is well advised to choose his words carefully. This is something the incumbent, left to his own devices, is not always capable of doing. A State of the Union speech finesses that difficulty. The speaker speaks off the teleprompter, not the cuff. And the words that scroll down on the angled reflectors to his left and his right are as carefully — or, at any rate, as exhaustively — considered as bureaucratic thoroughness can make them. Every prepared Presidential address has multiple authors, but a State of the Union is the product of whole buildings full of them. The text that George W. Bush recited last Tuesday night had gone through thirty drafts.

It’s safe to assume, therefore, that the President was not speaking casually when he identified America’s mortal enemy as “radical Islam.” This is the latest milestone in a wandering terminological journey that began shortly after September 11, 2001. “War on terror” has always been problematic, at both ends. The word “war” has the requisite urgency, and it has proved useful in intimidating the political opposition at home. But, as we have seen in Iraq and elsewhere, its associations—pitched battles, clashing states, disciplined armies with general staffs—can invite actions that are, at best, beside the point. “Terror” is not a conquerable enemy, or an end in itself. It is a method of achieving some political goal, however outlandish or unrealizable—an ugly and frightening method, as was the bombing of civilian populations in the Second World War. But “war on terror” is a chimerical circle, like “war to end all wars.” Woodrow Wilson’s war to end all wars defeated imperial Germany, but it did not, and could not, defeat war. Nor can a war on terror defeat terror.

Now and then over the past couple of years, the Administration has halfheartedly tried to shed the straitjacket of its own slogan. “We actually misnamed the war on terror,” Bush mused in the summer of 2004. “It ought to be ‘the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.’ ” A year later, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made a run at substituting the catchier “global struggle against violent extremism.” It didn’t fly. Bush, who had decided that he wants to be a war President, not a struggle President, shot it down. But “struggle” would at least have acknowledged that warfare is not the sole solution, and “violent extremism” would have recognized a motive behind the method.

Last October, speaking at the National Endowment for Democracy, the President returned to the topic, floating more names for the “focussed ideology” that brought down the Twin Towers. “Some call this evil Islamic radicalism,” he said. “Others, militant jihadism; still others, Islamofascism.” As of last week, he seemed to have settled on “radical Islam.” It’s a bad choice, reminiscent of his early talk of a “crusade.” Violent jihadism, yes. Islamist (as distinct from Islamic) terrorism, yes. But not Islam, radical or otherwise.

There’s no doubt, of course, that terrorists of the Al Qaeda ilk are drawn from the ranks of adherents of “radical”—which is to say, extreme or fundamentalist—Islam. But radical Islam is a far broader and more variegated phenomenon than the terrorist virus that infects it. Its incarnations range from Al Qaeda to the clerical and legal establishments of Saudi Arabia. In virtually every iteration, it demands the subordination of women, the stunting of education, and the curbing of the freedom of speech, of the press, and of religion. It should be opposed, as part of America’s thirty-year-old campaign against violations of human rights. But it is not in and of itself a casus belli. Violence and terrorism are not intrinsic to it. And it is emphatically not something against which the United States should seek to fight a war to the death. One of Al Qaeda’s goals has been to frame the conflict as a holy war between Muslims and infidels. In calling it a war, Bush emphasized its seriousness, but at the cost of granting its criminal perpetrators the dignity of warriors. Calling it a war against Islam, even radical Islam, grants them the other half of their wish.

In the section of his speech devoted to the prospects for what he called “democratic reform across the broader Middle East,” the President said, “The Palestinian people have voted in elections, and now the leaders of Hamas must recognize Israel, disarm, reject terrorism, and work for lasting peace.” He was right to emphasize the aspects of Hamas’s ideology that are inimical to peace, rather than calling on it to abandon its (radical) Islamic identity. But he skated lightly over the implications for his own policies of Hamas’s victory in last month’s Palestinian legislative elections. All over the region, the unintended consequences are piling up. The elections in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Lebanon were a good thing, but they resulted in gains for, respectively, warlords, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah. In Iraq, Bush asserted, “we are winning.” But the war there, which shows no sign of ending, has stretched America’s military to the limit, pinning it down while potentially more dangerous threats have gathered. The “weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-program activities” that Bush spoke of in his 2004 address have been found, but they turn out to be in Iran. And the Iranian theocracy—strengthened by high oil prices and an election in which a relatively moderate President was succeeded by a Holocaust denier—has won unprecedented influence in a strategically important neighboring country: Iraq.

On the related subject of homeland security, Bush had only two things to say. He demanded that Congress reauthorize—presumably without changing a word—the so-called Patriot Act, which was passed in haste shortly after the September 11th attacks. And he defended—no, boasted of—the National Security Agency’s vast, formerly secret program of warrantless electronic eavesdropping, undertaken on his orders and rebranded in his speech as “the terrorist-surveillance program.” “If there are people inside our country who are talking with Al Qaeda,” he said, “we want to know about it, because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again.” But those who are questioning Bush’s program, both Democrats and Republicans, agree that terrorists must be surveilled. What alarms them is not just that the President is breaking a particular law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but that his rationale for doing so amounts to a claim that he can flout any law at all, as long as the flouting is under cover of an endless (and, according to him, misnamed) war.

The evening’s only startling moment came when Bush announced that “America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.” This acknowledgment, as welcome as it was overdue, was followed by a call for an increase in federal funding of research into alternative fuels. For this, and for failing to renew his call for drilling in the Arctic wilderness, the President was quickly attacked in a Wall Street Journal editorial as a Jimmy Carter clone, a liberal, and a co-opter of Democratic ideas—a fairly good indicator that he may be on to something. But it soon became apparent that, while he may be a reformed drinker, he is not yet a reformed oilman. “The best way to break this addiction is through technology,” he said. Whether or not it’s the best way, it’s the only way he mentioned. But relying solely on a cheap, painless technological fix to conquer oil addiction is like relying solely on methadone to conquer heroin addiction. Abstinence is needed, too. The energy equivalent is conservation, which is superior in every way to substitution. The best way to encourage conservation— and the true sign of a serious energy policy —would be imposing a hefty gasoline tax and raising mandatory fuel-efficiency standards. No points for guessing whether any such proposals found their way into the speech. Anyway, the subsidies Bush is proposing would, at best, restore research spending to its Clinton-era levels. Two days after the speech, the Times reported that the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory will begin laying off workers next week, thanks to a fifteen-per-cent cut in its current budget. The State of the Union address was a disappointment only to those who were foolish or forgetful enough to expect something better. Copyright 2006 | The New Yorker

Stop calling it the 'war on terror'
The term was wrong from the start, and now it's linked with a disastrous real war in Iraq.
By Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford University
and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Los Angeles Times | November 2, 2006

WHETHER or not a formal post-mortem into the Iraq war is launched by a newly Democrat-controlled Congress after Tuesday's midterm elections, no one doubts that this has been a war, one without end. Yet one day it will end. Will we then still be at war? Were 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, the London bombings, Madrid, Bali and the rest all just pages of the opening chapter in a long saga called the War on Terror?

For all their criticisms of the way President Bush has waged the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, most Democrats don't challenge the central concept of the war on terror. They merely claim they could fight it better. Only a few intellectual Democrats, such as financier and philanthropist George Soros, insist that the very idea of the war on terror is, in his words, "a false metaphor."

Most Europeans, by contrast, agree with Soros. I have argued the same point. British military historian Sir Michael Howard was prescient in a brilliant article in Foreign Affairs titled "What's in a name?" and published just months after the 9/11 attacks. When then-Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that the U.S. was "at war" with terrorism, wrote Howard, "he made a very natural but terrible and irrevocable error." Apart from anything else, to use this language dignified the terrorists with the status of belligerents when they should have been treated as criminals. In a backhanded way, the coinage was itself a kind of glorification of terrorism.

Political words have consequences — especially when used by the most powerful nation on Earth — and one could plausibly suggest that much blood has flowed as a result of that choice of words.

It's clearly the case that after Sept. 11, 2001, when the administration said "war," it meant war in the familiar sense of trained people being commanded to go kill other people. In 2002, I asked a very senior administration official how this war on terror might end. He replied: "With the elimination of the terrorists." Yes, from the outset officials acknowledged that this was no longer war in the classic sense of two uniformed armies meeting on a field of battle. Yet the decision to make Iraq a central theater of the war on terror was, among other things, a kind of desperate reaching back to a more conventional kind of warfare that the mightiest army in the history of the world could clearly and swiftly win. Or so they thought.

In the last week, I have heard two powerful arguments for retaining the word "war" to describe the essential character of the age we're in. Lecturing in Oxford, Philip Bobbitt, the American historian and author of "The Shield of Achilles," and Matthew d'Ancona, editor of the conservative British weekly the Spectator, both insisted that we should not throw out the baby of the "war on terror" with the bathwater of Iraq.

Both counter-posed the notion of war to that of combating crime, favored by many liberal Europeans. Yes, bad mistakes were made in Iraq, said D'Ancona, but the very nature of this war is so new that it was inevitable that big mistakes would be made. The new terrible trio of rogue states, weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism cannot be beaten by the old Cold War trio of containment, deterrence and nonproliferation. Terrorists are waging a long-term psychological war, aimed at reducing us to a state of terror. This is not the Cold War, said D'Ancona, it's the cold-sweat war.

Bobbitt, meanwhile, talked of no less than three wars on terror: against global-networked terrorists, against the proliferation of WMD and against large-scale natural and non-natural assaults on civilian infrastructure, from earthquakes and the consequences of global warming to genocide and ethnic cleansing. That just about covers all the bases.

Both made some strikingly similar claims, far removed from the initial gung-ho rhetoric of Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. This, D'Ancona and Bobbitt insisted, is a long-term, generational struggle, which requires patience as much as patriotism. Neither had a good word to say for Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib. Both agreed that this war has to be fought within a framework of international law — which, however, must be adjusted to the new circumstances. And they emphasized the new context of what Bobbitt calls "market states," in which citizens have become like consumers, with governments behaving like nervous company boards. Does the consumer not like the product? Withdraw it from the shelves at once. Our presence in Iraq, said D'Ancona, is being treated like a listed company whose shares on the stock exchange are in free fall.

These are important points, which a segment of the British and European left has already taken onboard.

They failed to convince me, however, that the term "war on terror" should not be thrown out. It wasn't a good term to start with. Whatever the might-have-beens, it's now inextricably associated with a discredited U.S. policy and a disastrous real war in Iraq. What would we lose by dropping it?

However, then we need an alternative. It might be better if international terrorists were treated as international criminals, but the overall metaphor of crime is not up to the job. A word that keeps popping up is "struggle." In substance, that's about right. This is a long-term struggle against multiple threats to free and open societies.
But the word "struggle" has its own baggage. It really won't do in German; not since "Mein Kampf" anyway. In English — English English, that is — it has a faint echo of people handing out copies of Socialist Worker on street corners. No, I can't see President John McCain or Hillary Clinton taking up "the struggle." So I'm struggling to find a better term. Ideas, anyone?

Extraordinary rendition
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article documents a current event. (as of April 5, 2006)
Information may change rapidly as the event progresses.

"Extraordinary rendition is an American extra-judicial procedure which involves the sending of criminal suspects, generally suspected terrorists or alleged supporters of groups which the US Government considers to be terrorist organizations, to countries other than the United States for imprisonment and interrogation. Critics have accused the CIA of rendering suspects to other countries in order to avoid US laws prescribing due process and prohibiting torture and have called this "torture by proxy"[2] or "torture flights"[3]."

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