279. "The Utter Absurdity of War"

Now here's Nora Roberts in Sunday's NYT Book Review saying that she'd like to have President Obama and every other world leader read Joseph Heller's Catch-22 because it's "a brilliant, funny, crazed story that perfectly depicts the utter absurdity of war."

I have little energy left to beat on Catch-22 (three blog posts, two articles, and a dozen or more dinner-table rants will really take it out of you) so I will simply say one thing: that I have yet to find, among all the people I have questioned, one person willing to say that fighting the Nazis was "'wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate" — that is, absurd. 

A lot of people are willing to say, "Men who gave orders in World War II were often wildly unreasonable or illogical etc," and a lot more are willing to say, "War is bloody and cruel and terrible," and the latter is probably what Roberts means, but there's this word "absurd," and she, and (my guess) all the professors who voted Catch-22 the seventh best novel of the twentieth century, can't resist it.  It's so existential-philosophical.  What else could elevate a shallow book for 1960s juveniles, a book full of frat-boy sexism, vaudeville logic, ponderous whimsicality, and specious humanity, to such heights?  And keep it there after all these years of education and sophistication?  (See Posts 7, 54, 125, 129, 224.)

199. Embracing "Gay Marriage," Holding on to Socrates

 

"Old people can't reproduce themselves and they can 'marry.'" That does it.  There's no place left to go, traditionalists.  You had one argument left and Justice Kagan's counter-example destroys it.  Now you have to share your precious word.

Remember the argument?  "You can't have the same word unless you're the same in all relevant respects.  Ability to reproduce is relevant in marriage.  You can't reproduce.  You can't have the word." 

Then, boom, "neither can old people."  Traditionalists try to explain the counter-example away.  "We give old people the title 'married' the way we give honorary doctorates.  They didn't earn them but we want to show our respect for them."  It doesn't wash.  "All right, then, think of 'married' as an honorary title.  Can you withhold your respect?"

I, by age and upbringing a traditionalist, don't dispute that I will have to give up my position on the word "marriage," but I'm curious about how much else I will have to give up.  My position on "animal rights"?  I argued, in posts 27 and 79, that the word "rights," taken from the legal context that gave it its meaning, only disordered our concepts when we tried to apply it to animals.  We had to reconceive so many terms that depended on it — "contract," "obligation," "responsibility," all the terms, in fact, that referred to reciprocal relationships.

"Same-sex marriage" appeared to do the same thing.  The word "marriage" was so firmly fixed in one meaning ("the legal union of a man and a woman") that nobody, when they wrote laws and constitutions and devised ceremonies, even thought of man-man or woman-woman.  Add those and you had to reconceive a lot of other terms.   Like "adultery."  A wayward lesbian spouse can adulterate her marriage in the sense of introducing a spiritual or esthetic impurity into something pure, but she can't adulterate it in the sense lawmakers had foremost in mind: introducing a physical impurity into a blood line.  And "bastard."  A spouse in the old sense faced the problem of raising a bastard child.  Courts worried about the status of bastards.  I saw no equivalents in gay marriage.  Then there was "incest." Which equivalent relations would come under our marriage prohibitions, and be fueled by the ancient taboos that flowed into them?  Brother-brother?  Father-son?

Reconceive these words, that's what the traditionalist thinks he needs to do, but perhaps all he needs to do is refeel them.  Emotional adjustment, not intellectual adjustment.  The latter is easily accomplished.  All you do (and there are always plenty of quick-minded helpers) is redefine your words a little and expand your ideas slightly.  The former is, for traditionalists, not so easy.

Even if words are incontestably out of place, not all verbal dislocation is evidence of conceptual disorder, and not all that disorder is bad.  Comedians and poets live by dislocating words, and we join right in, laughing or crying.  It's not serious, or it's serious in a different way.

When you're classifying things, however, it's serious.  Socrates started us all off seriously, though he put his advice to his students, as so often, into a metaphor: "slice nature at her joints" (Phaedrus 265d-266a).  Let names end where bones end.  Careless namers are bad butchers.

Take Socrates' metaphor seriously and the merest reminder turns you serious.  Hear "verbal dislocation" and, thinking of a shoulder, you see bad things — something coming out of a socket, ligaments twisting, other bones wrenched down the line.  That's bad in nature, where bones break loose, but you know it's also bad, though less obviously, in language, where words break loose. 

I know, you can take Socrates’ metaphor so seriously that you turn into a schoolmarm, red-penciling every word that's even slightly out of place.  On TV now weathermen regularly speak of a "piece of energy."  Yesterday one said that "a piece is coming over the Rockies.  "No, young man," you say in his margin, "stuff is coming over the Rockies.  It can come in pieces.  Energy can't do that.  It's an attribute (or capacity, or quality).  Here it's an attribute of molecules, the stuff of the atmosphere you are talking about."

For me that's a classic case of verbal dislocation leading to conceptual disorder.  Say energy comes in pieces and you've confused your concepts of stuff and attributes.  You've weakened your ability to make clear distinctions. 

"All right, word dislocation is seriously harmful in scientific taxonomy, seriously harmful in the physics lab, seriously harmful in philosophy class, but in daily life?"

Daily life makes national life, especially in a democracy, and a citizen's assent to national decisions may depend on his understanding of a word.  Consider, if you are an American, the word "war."  You can assent to bombing and killing and exposing your young men to bombing and killing and to doing all the things you know they have to do when they go to war. That's part of your understanding of the word "war."  War is hell.  That, I think, was the understanding of the makers of the Constitution when they specified that only Congress could declare war.  They didn't want any sliding into hell.  But if a president moves the word "war" out and another one, like "police action," or "surgical strike," in, your country can do that.  Same bombing and killing of war but since he's called it something else you, having lost your word and obscured your concept and diminished your ability to make distinctions, will be less equipped to oppose that bombing and killing.  If he'd called it "war" you might not have given your assent.  That's serious as blood.

Though there are many cases where a composition teacher can take the oft-given advice to "lighten up," to "quit being so picky," and accept the innocuous substitution of one word for another, in the "war" case, and in cases approaching the seriousness of war, he cannot.  In the part of our national life that grows out of daily life it's clearly serious — or, if you prefer, "consequential."  It's consequential enough for him to take scientific taxonomy as a model.

"So he'd have us all be scientific taxonomists."

The only excuse for not being a scientific taxonomist in daily political life is time.  You can't carve a subject perfectly in the rush of events. But you don't have to butcher.  You can't make every word fit perfectly in a plea for help.  But you don't have to bawl.  Just a little care with the carving knife could, for example, have cut the spin off that expression "peace-keeping force" that Ronald Reagan used for the Marines he sent into Lebanon.  He (or his word-doctors) wanted people to think approvingly of peace, leaving out the force in the standard referents for the word "peacekeeper": hand guns, submachine guns, missiles, and armed vigilante groups, ready to keep the peace by, don't mention it, killing.  Then, instead of acting on the referential meaning he acted on the spin, and had his force just sit there peacefully — until his less confused enemy blew it up.  To the degree that American voters accepted this and drew no lessons from it for the next intervention they are deaf to Socrates and all taxonomists and composition teachers who speak for him — that is, they are lazy students.  If they get bloody chunks of meat and bone from deliberately bad butchers they have only themselves to blame.

It's a matter of dissecting-table habits.  Carelessness over the body of sports, or entertainment, or love, or legal relationships, inclines you to carelessness over the body of warfare.  Again a president, to rouse you against a nation he wants to war against, calls it "evil."  Unless you slice away that spin (recommended by one of his doctors for its "theological" cast) you are going to find yourself, and the Congressman guided by you, unable to make sensible compromises.  Only bad Christians compromise with evil.  The whole conceptual structure of international relationships has been wrenched around.

"As 'same-sex' wrenches around the conceptual structure of marital relationships?"

Just what I was getting around to.  "Same-sex" certainly removes from our minds a lot that the word "marriage" once put into it.  The sense of a socket-connection, for example, the one we think of when we "marry" the ends of hoses, is gone.  But whether that dislocation matters or not depends on what we gain by the dislocation.  Much as it might hurt an analytic philosopher to say so, conceptual disorder is not the worst sin in the world.  It's probably not as bad as hard-heartedness, or intellectual pride.  To avoid hardheartedness, to exhibit compassion, to convey good will, to reassure an excluded minority that we are one with them, that may well be more important than keeping all our words in order.

So "marriage" wins a position after "same-sex."  The analytic accountant would say that the social benefit outweighed the verbal cost.  His only complaint would be against those who, out of neglect or ideology, failed to enter a cost at all.  The logician would say, in view of the irremovable counter-example, that it was a necessary victory.  The Christian would see a demonstration that the force of brotherly love and compassion is greater than the force of intellect.  Christ over Socrates.

I am happy to go along — provided that my needs as a composition teacher in America are met.  Socrates has to be left with enough weight to help me sell students on verbal care and conceptual order, enough anyway to help keep their country out of unjustifiable wars.

Note: My self-published book, Today's Sex and Yesterday's Poetry: Readings from the Erotic Renaissance, is now available on Amazon and Kindle.  Author entry: H. R. Swardson.

162. Looking On

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By now we ought to be accustomed to "standing there looking on" while an atrocity is committed.  We stood and looked at Rwanda and Darfur and the Congo, as earlier we had looked at Biafra and Bangladesh.  I see, by Googling "atrocities 'while the world looks on'," that we have also recently looked on at atrocities in Lebanon, Algeria, Mali, the Kachin State in Burma, and the Congo again.  We looked on for a while in the Balkans.

We did not look on in Somalia (warlords stopping food shipments) or Iraq (Saddam Hussein gassing his own people).  We stopped looking on in Bosnia and needed only a glance in Kosovo.

We ought also be accustomed to reproach.  We got it in nearly all those cases.  Some was ignorant (what could anybody expect the U.S. to do in Bangladesh?), some came from too great a distance (the Kachin State in Burma), and some came from people with no constituency in the U. S. (the Tuareg in Mali — not at all like the Christians in Darfur).

Some cases taught us to re-evaluate reproach.  We couldn't stand being reproached for looking on in Somalia then we couldn't stand looking at our getting in.  We couldn't stand looking on as Saddam Hussein gassed his own people then we couldn't stand looking at what his own people, left to themselves, did to their own hospitals, schools, museums, and each other.

Now we are looking on as Bashar al-Assad commits more and more "atrocities against his people."   We can hear the reproaches coming.  And we know our government is ready to do things that will head them off.  In May General Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said "that military options are being crafted" (Fox News, 5-28-12) and in July White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that further atrocities in Syria by President Bashar al-Assad's forces should eliminate any doubt that a coordinated international response was necessary at the United Nations (Reuters).

What will the response be?  A calibrated, quagmire-avoiding response worked in Libya but can it work here?  If it doesn't, where are we?  That's hard to say but we know there's a good chance that we'd be looking at Syrian civilians, left to themselves, doing terrible things to each other.  Already the breakdown of authority in Syria is looking like the breakdown in Iraq — theft, kidnappings, inactive police stations, general lawlessness (NYT 8-10-12).

OK, but that's in our imaginations, struggling to construct the future.  These pictures are right in front of us, there, the broken bodies of five-year-olds.  Our hearts cry for action.

Yes, and so did our grandparents' hearts when the British showed us Belgian babies with their hands cut off by Germans, and so did our parents' hearts when the Kuwaitis told us how Iraqi soldiers were taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die.  The world is full of heart-users.  If you don't believe it look at that Iraqi story.  It was told by a poor Kuwaiti "eye witness" who turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, acting on the advice of a hired American public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton.

All right, so you know that and the next atrocity you see or hear about you say, "OK which PR outfit is managing this one?  Which group is behind it?"  After a while your first question is a cui bono:  "Who stands to gain from the pounding of my heart?"

That's where you could end, in action-stopping cynicism, until you ask, "Who stood to gain from the heart-pounding over Hitler's first atrocities?  A lot of near-sighted, imperialist victors of World War I who produced that stupid, vindictive Versailles Treaty we'd have to force Hitler to abide by.  Act in their interest?  Not on your life."  And there you are, unleashing Hitler on Europe.

So you can't always hold off just because somebody bad is going to profit.  Sometimes you're facing an atrocity-generator you have to stop early, if you're going to stop it at all.  Decide to look on then and somebody is sure to remind you of the Big Looking On of the twentieth century, 1933-1939.  Reproach, reproach.

It's all so terribly uncertain.  Even your right to use the word "atrocity" is in doubt.  There's an 18-year-old soldier, drafted to fight in a war he didn't believe in, bleeding to death before our eyes.  But we can't call what we're seeing an "atrocity."  He's wearing a uniform and his body is 13 years older than the bodies that just moved us to tears.  So what do you call him?  What do you call war?

88. Pictures. Meaning, Facts.

When I'm told animals are "in danger" I picture fellow creatures I want to help. If I know that a human being is responsible — as the hobby farmer who went away without providing enough water for his stock was — I get angry. I picture cows and pigs and chickens gasping for a drink. I see them dying.

When I'm told that a species is in danger and that human beings are responsible my first pictures make me even angrier. I see families of gorillas dying on mountain slopes — as I once saw, in a movie, herds of dinosaurs gasping on a plain. A whole species going down! Who did this?

Then, when I pay closer attention to the meaning of the words I'm hearing, I realize that "animals" and "species" refer to quite different things, and if death is what affects me then I have to distinguish them. There is no relation between the scenes of animal death that arouse my anger and the security of the species. Animals with many of their kind in the world will die in as much pain as animals with few of their kind, and there will be more of them. In a world of constant predation, disease, and deprivation secure species supply me with more pitiable scenes than endangered species do.

By responding to words more thoughtfully I understand the fellow-creature problem better and that makes me a better member of the community of those who love animals and are concerned about the future. I will have seen that there are two issues here, and that I will damage their discussion, and their campaign — or, better, campaigns — if I confuse them. There's animal death with its causes and consequences and there's species extinction with its causes and consequences. Responsibilities may coincide but they are different.

Words both have meaning and generate pictures and sometimes the pictures take us a lot further than the meaning permits us to go. If the word-suggested picture is reinforced by a television picture we may be taken so far we'll never get back to the meaning. I hear "terrorist" and think "threat." I see five bodies around a bus stop and think "awful threat." I see thirty in a market place and think "monstrous threat." I'm feeling just what a "terrorist," according to the dictionary, wants me to feel, threatened. But how big a threat are these terrorists? The fact is that our chances of dying at the hand of a terrorist are lower than the chances of our dying by walking across the street. Do we consider that when we declare "war" on terrorists, in response to their "war" on us? There's no comparison. Think of what a threat of "war" means to a nation (tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands killed, billions spent). It's not close to what a "terrorist campaign" threatens. Yet there we go, picture-driven, into war.

It was pictures (starving children with flies on their faces) that drove us into Somalia and pictures (helicopter down, American bodies dragged through the streets) that drove us out. It was pictures of Belgian babies with their hands cut off, some say, that drove the Allies at the Germans in World War I. It was a word-picture of Kuwaiti babies taken from their incubators and left to die on the floor that first drove us into Iraq. There are always other forces driving us, of course, but the power is in the pictures — as the propaganda experts who provided those Belgian and Kuwaiti pictures well knew.

Attention to pictures, even false ones, can work for good (driving us into Nazi Germany) or for ill (driving us into Iraq) but it's clear, after all we have seen in the last hundred years, that only attention to meanings and facts can work for understanding. The pictures that drive us never tell us whether we should or should not be driven.

86. "Testosterone"

I think maybe "testosterone" is the best word for what keeps getting Americans into places like Iraq. Not "hubris," not "pride." Those words are too classroom. We need a street word.

Not any old street word, though. It's got to be one we can use with ease and confidence — without losing weight.  And I think that "testosterone" has gone pop enough to work.

How would it go? I see Americans beating their drums for an invasion. We shout, "Check the testosterone! Check the testosterone!" They say, "Oh, oh, too much," and stop to give their action more thought. We eggheads have communicated with all the confidence of a popular talk-show host or advice columnist.

Testosterone is what Thucydides saw in the Athenians, "seldom enjoying their possessions because they are always adding to them.…They are by nature incapable of either living a quiet life themselves or of allowing anyone else to do so." It's what Aeschylus and Sophocles saw in all men. Over-reaching. Dante, under the word "pride," made it the foundation for every other sin. Our word "testosterone" may sound pop but it hooks into a lot of weighty material.

So it gives us a way to tell the nation, and maybe the world, what it needs most: a good hormone manager. Like Elizabeth I. Oh, could she handle testosterone! I mean, half the royal balls in Europe ("Me! Me! Marry me!") and all the important noble ones — Raleigh, Essex, Drake — in England were hers to manipulate. Or like Pope Urban II, who pointed the really loaded ones at the Holy Land.

The whole world lacked such a manager in the years before World War I. What a loss to Europe! Great Power, Great Power, you had to be a Great Power. Think of all those European lions, growling over the carcass of Africa. Not a tamer in sight.  It's a wonder World War I didn't break out sooner.

Why aren't we Americans better at testosterone management? We have a big army. Who learns testosterone management better than a paratroop colonel? All those young men coming out of jump school, West Point, full of beans. Macho bursting out in all directions. Fights in the bars. Swagger in the O-clubs. He's got to channel it toward the enemy. "Keep your goddam mind on the goddam mission," he says to the lieutenant off on some extra-curricular heroics.

Free-floating testosterone, it's such a problem. In the Pacific it wanted to charge right over without waiting for the new carriers. In the poolrooms it wanted France now, now, before we had the landing craft.

What, let me ask you, was behind the Army's closing off Gordon Liddy's career? Fear of free-floating testosterone. Knowledge of it was just what the FBI lacked when they sent him out undercover to a town in Indiana and he blew the mission by swagger in a bar. "Try taking an airport with guys like that," says the colonel, "and you'll learn something about testosterone."

Some of our leaders have been pretty good at blocking unwanted testosterone.  Nimitz put a quick cork on the kind that would have had us charge west without the firepower, and Roosevelt certainly stifled those who wanted Normandy in '43.

It's in men who have had no experience of war — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Liddy — that the testosterone seems to float most freely. They're the ones you've really got to watch. Give in to them and you could be looking at a busted country.

And they're the ones who make Elizabeth look like such a …what? a gift from God.  She had no experience of war, and oh how she handled those guys. Oh what she gave the country. Years of peace and a surplus in the treasury. How did she do it?

I think it has to be imagination. Learning. Ability to speak to ambassadors in their own language. Good tutors, hard study. Attention to detail. Self-control. A little eggy, yes, but what a contrast with George W. Bush!

21. Dancing Around Clausewitz.

"It's war, stupid." That can well be on your wall, but if you are a leader of a NATO nation now you can't act on it. The people you are sending in to help force Qaddafi out have to be called "liaison officers" (NYT, 4-21-11), as the people Lyndon Johnson first sent into Viet Nam had to be called (as we are calling the people we will leave behind in Afghanistan) "advisers" and "trainers." Nobody wants to be "at war."

To fill in the wall message I like to go to Carl von Clausewitz, whom I hear saying, "Look, the only way you can make some leaders do things is kill their people. The people you send to do that are called 'soldiers' and the thing they will be doing is called 'war,' whose law of escalation into worse and worse killing I have explained. Don't deceive yourself into thinking your use of force leads to anything else."

Are the statesmen who send liaison officers and advisers deceiving themselves? If so Clausewitz's "realpolitik" shows up their "illusion politics." If they are not deceiving themselves, if they see the reality of war as they hide it, I think those statesmen are a rebuke to Clausewitz and to those who define "realism" so narrowly. They see a political reality that makes calling things by their right (that is, accurate) names unrealistic. They see a public that denies votes to speakers of "war." On Clausewitz's wall they'd put "It's the election, stupid."

This is the pain of U. S. Presidents: both wall statements are true. Sometimes they need to remind themselves of one, sometimes the other. The trick is in changing them to meet the times. What a problem! By now Obama's wall must look like a bad mathematician's blackboard.

The better leaders of democracies can calculate coming pain the better they'll know how to reduce it. What they need is a graph that would show them total pain, so that they could see how much a short, sharp pain, say, paid off. Go in with a big force and get the killing over with. There's the initial spike but look at the total. Maybe worth it, maybe not. Figure the area under the curve.

How would you figure this one: Obama's back-and-forth on the wall, starting with the destruction of the Qaddafi column to Benghazi (war), then "out of there in a week" (politics), then CIA on the ground (war), then the turnover to NATO (politics), and now (also NYT, 4-21-11) "sending Predator drones." The linguistic comfort in that last choice (he frankly makes war while satisfying the political need to keep our people alive) can't conceal the fact that Obama is in great pain. Now what you have to figure is the amount of pain there would have been if he had let the Qaddafi column go to Benghazi and smash the rebels right there.

I see we're going to have to factor in the ability of the American public to bear the sight of what clearly would have been a slaughter in Benghazi, but that at the moment is too much for me to go into. I welcome ideas and will take up the problem in a later post.

20. "Humanitarian crisis"

"To help avert a humanitarian crisis" is, President Obama explained, the reason our planes bombed Qaddafi forces heading for Benghazi. Now Qaddafi forces are using deadly cluster bombs against Misurata and Britain and France want him to join in on an air attack on them in order to "better fulfill the United Nations mandate to protect civilians" (NYT, 4-16-11).

When does a humanitarian crisis end? The first one must have ended when the Benghazi column was destroyed, since President Obama then turned operations over to NATO. No crisis, no reason for America to join in. Now, by the same standard of danger to civilians, we have another crisis. How long will they keep coming?

As I read yesterday's newspaper I kept hearing Carl von Clausewitz, the German war philosopher, telling Obama across 200 years that the crises will keep coming and likely get worse until one side gives in. Each side, according to Clausewitz, will think that its next inhumanity will be so unbearable that the other side will be the one to give in. Inhumanity (the right word for what's done to the enemy, soldiers or not) is the way to win, and once you start it, and trigger the spirit of revenge, it never turns itself off. Only the naive think war is anything but reciprocal inhumanity.

That's the law of war. But there's another law, applicable to observers considering intervention, which says that human beings can't bear to watch inhumanity. That law comes into play now when we (the U. S., Obama) consider what we might do to end the present inhumanity in Libya. One choice is to intervene and be so thoroughly inhumane to the Qaddafi forces that they give in. That could be quick. The other is to refrain from intervention and watch the Qaddafi forces be inhumane to the rebels. That could be quick too. Either way somebody is going to have to be seriously inhumane. That's the only way wars between determined people have ever been ended. Directed inhumanity by outside powers has ended many wars in the past. The difference this time is that we're all going to have to watch.

Watching the inhumanity could be so hard for the electorate to bear that the President will not be re-elected. How can he avoid that? By calibrating his intervention so that the visible inhumanity never becomes so hard to bear that voters hold it against him. (This is to read "humanitarian crisis" as "political crisis," and define it as "the point at which television images of inhumanity become unbearable.")

One danger to Obama in calibrating his inhumanity is that he won't ever inflict enough (it's the hardest kind of fine-tuning in the world) to keep the Qaddafi forces' infliction of inhumanity on the rebels from being successful. He'll discover that only through an unbearably visible infliction of inhumanity can he end Qaddafi's inhumanity. The closer this is to the election the more painful this will be.

The other danger is that his calibration leaves the two sides so balanced that low-grade inhumanity remains visible on the nation's screens for years. That might not endanger his election but it could well endanger his place in history, something Presidents are bound to worry about.

When you really feel for Obama in his pain, as I did after reading the paper, you have crazy dreams of what would soften it. I dreamed of an electorate that had studied Clausewitz. "There, there," they now say to him, "we know what war is. If you refuse to intervene we can stand to watch the rebels being slaughtered. We won't hold it against you. And if you intervene, as long as you do it realistically and intelligently — that is to say, with sufficient inhumanity — we won't hold that against you either."

11. Word-Watch: The Libyan Intervention

Was ever a president in a more ticklish semantic situation? American and allied planes have just wiped out a Gadhafi column heading for Benghazi. If ever a military action deserved the name "surgical strike" this one did. It was precise, limited, clean, and expertly done. Yet the Obama administration couldn't call it a "surgical strike" because that was Lyndon Johnson's expression for the first actions that sucked us into Viet Nam. Use of it would provoke the here-we-go-again response.

The same is probably true of "evil." Obama can't use it because it was George W. Bush's high-suction word for the "axis" Iraq was said to be part of. No careful speechwriter wants to remind the left and middle of the right's play (with a "more theological" word than "hatred") for evangelical support. So there goes that one, no matter what awful thing Gadhafi does.

The expression "protecting civilians," used to describe the aim of the whole operation (Odyssey Dawn), comes with none of that earlier baggage but already it's causing trouble. It covered what, according to the Associated Press, we were doing in that strike, "preventing Moammar Gadhafi's forces from inflicting more violence on civilians — particularly in and around the rebel stronghold of Benghazi." Trying to picture civilians who weren't rebels and rebels who weren't civilians and locate them all with respect to the stronghold was too much even for the straight-faced NBC reporter.

You can find a word a casualty-wary public will accept but it's so hard to keep from stretching it. The other aim of Odyssey Dawn was to "degrade the Libyan military's ability to contest a no-fly zone." For the Benghazi strike you had to stretch the acceptable "no-fly" to "no-drive." If you didn't you had something like "tanks caught taxiing toward rebel stronghold." You could tell by the reporter's face that this line wouldn't hold for long, at least among the verbally sophisticated.

Does the reaction of the sophisticated, the reporters and the pundits and the professors, matter much? It's the voting masses (meaning only those so busy making a living they don't have time for careful examination) who in the end determine military action. If suffering humanity is to be relieved, and these words work on those masses to relieve it, what case do we have for a sophisticated view?