16. "Boots on the ground."

As a way of referring to the presence of soldiers, "boots on the ground" appeared in the New York Times only 12 times between 1851 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then it took off, rising to 34 in 2007, slacking to 17 in 2010, and now, with the Libyan action, it's hit 16 in three months and is getting play at every level, journalistic and political. Its attraction, apparently, is in the way it brings the distant ("troops present") close to the concrete reality. General Bernard E. Trainor made sure nobody would miss the political bite in it when he said, in 1999, "If you want to radically change the behavior of your opponent, it takes boots on the ground to do it.'' Lose the lofty pretensions. Boots. There. "With," he could expect us to add, "flesh in them." An expression that makes a dangerous semantic situation even more dangerous is not going to be welcomed by the Obama administration but they have to deal with it. "Are there going to be boots on the ground in Libya?" Everybody knows that some of the people in those boots will be killed. The administration knows that they will not just be killed but that they will turn into what Serge Schmemann called "televisable casualties." "No," says their spokesman. What else can he say? The public grieves over televisable casualties. But it also grieves over the victory of evil-doers. Gadhafi is an evil-doer, as Saddam Hussein was an evil-doer. If only there were a way to remove the evil-doer without televisable casualties. Here's where the old semantic try comes in. You send pilots, whose boots are in the air. Or you put CIA people, who don't wear boots, on the ground. Your "no boots on the ground" stands. Linguistic analysts can find the administration's choice of words entertaining (ha, ha, those booted pilots, those CIA guys in sneakers) but they have to recognize that Obama's people are wrestling with a very old, very difficult problem: how to balance the public's attractions to both goodness and security. Love of the good moves them to action against evil, as seen in Gadhafi. Love of security holds them back, making them ask, "Will the action make us safer?" Only a yes answer justifies the casualties. I remember once when the public was very grateful to an administration for putting security ahead of goodness. In 1942 it was good to have nothing to do with fascists. Then the administration, to secure the safety of American troops landing in Africa, cozied up to Admiral Darlan, a despicable fascist, and made a deal with him. The boots made it to African ground with few casualties. We saw that if you love good purely you weaken yourself, take high casualties, give Hitler a better chance, and maybe lose out to the big evil. Thank you, thank you, President Roosevelt. On the other hand, pure love of security can, in the end, itself weaken security. It was love of its own security that, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, kept the U.S. from joining any international effort that might have stopped Germany before it was too late. I remember the isolationist argument that yes, he was an evil-doer, "but we've got three thousand miles of ocean" to give us security. No boots for the Rhineland, where Hitler could have been most easily stopped. Every president contemplating military action has to measure public desire on two scales, a good-evil scale and a safety-danger scale. When the contemplated object of the action is both evil and a danger, as Hitler was, the president has it easy. When the object is neither evil nor a danger, as China has been most of its life, he has it easy. When both register, but one is higher than the other, he has it fairly easy. He just has to make sure of his reading. It's when they're close, as I think they are with Qadhafi, that he's got the big balance problem, and can't help trying to solve it with words.