Sully asks readers to point out little Sontags who blasphemously enclose the phrase “war on terror” in scare quotes, or what he takes to be scare quotes. (Those last are plain vanilla quotation marks, though I’ll confess that I may possibly harbor some further ironic intent.) He writes: “I wonder what part of the phrase they don’t buy. That we are fighting terrorism? Or that we are at war?”
Well, let’s make a list… (1) We are in some sense engaged in a highly unconventional de facto war — but it used to be that this was the sort of thing one declared, as per the Constitution. It doesn’t hurt to recall that what’s “war” when its rhetorically useful is styled an “authorization of force” or a “police action” by Congress. (2) One does not actually wage war on “terrorism” — you can’t bomb an abstraction — any more than we wage war on “drugs” or “poverty.” Neither is it really a war on “terrorists,” unless the Basque group ETA and the Real IRA are going on Bush’s hit list. “War on al-Qaeda” might be appropriate, except… (3) A significant portion of what gets justified under the rubric of the “War on Terror” does not, in point of fact, have a whole hell of a lot to do with fighting terrorism at all. Even some of the staunch supporters of invading Iraq, for example, seem to concede that the rationale for attacking is the preservation of regional stability, not defense against some hypothetical handoff of Iraqi WMDs to terrorists. Given Bush’s apparent willingness to play musical justifications, I’m taking increasingly seriously accusations of still darker motives — the sort of thing I used to dismiss as irrelevant conspiracy theorizing.
Item number three is, I imagine, why most people who whip out the scare quotes are motivated to do so. Despite what the war party likes to imply, those of us who are less than enthusiastic about neoimperialism are not opposed to the idea that we ought to fight terrorism. It would hardly do to give credence to that kind of cheap wordplay by uncritically accepting the classification of the policies we oppose as part of the “war on terror.” The quotation marks serve as a reminder: this is something which its proponents claim will serve the cause of fighting terror. Do you believe them?
Incidentally, does anyone else find it as preposterous as I do that the author of a book on Orwell is now making use of a pseudo-distinction between waging war “on Iraq” and waging war “on Saddam”? And worse, has the temerity to accuse others of being somehow disingenuous or confused when they fail to emulate this Newspeak? I have visions of Hitchens scampering about the streets of Baghdad shouting to civillians: “Don’t worry! We aren’t bombing you, this is just a war on Saddam, you can come out of your shelters!” Or at any rate, I imagine him doing so until his comforting explanation is cut short by the bombs whose flight paths exhibit no difference to go with his distinction.
