If there’s one thing that war allows besides the requisite destruction, obliteration and general disruption of daily life, it’s an opportunity for politicos to sharply hone their doublespeak.
Take the renaming of our jaunt into the terrorist-harboring armpits of the world in search of jihad-addled nudniks who read their Korans with the safeties off.
At first it was called “Operation Infinite Justice.” Just our luck: The codename teed off Muslim clerics more fluent in theology than our Christian president. Apparently missing a few Sunday School classes, Bush failed to realize that – Uncle Sam’s ambitions aside – only God can mete out infinite justice. So, to appease the Islamic scholars, Bush and Co. decided to tee off the civil libertarians instead.
The antiterrorist terror campaign was re-christened “Operation Enduring Freedom.” To be fair, while lacking the retributive ferocity of the first, the new moniker still sounds patriotic enough to fit somewhere in a Bruce Springsteen lyric. If only it weren’t a bucket of bunk.
Before I explain why, let me say that from a purely pragmatic point of view, this decision makes sense; libertarians believe in the non-initiation of force – maybe Bush isn’t so sure about the other guys anymore. Still, it’s embarrassing. It’s like having to rename your kid because you find out when he’s 3 that his name also means “dummy” in another language (though why a codename is so public as to require vetting and approval by the hoi polloi is beyond me in the first place).
But one thing that isn’t beyond me is this: In wartime, “enduring” is the wrong adjective to park in front of a noun like “freedom.”
As America laces up its combat boots and starts taking inventory of its munitions and supplies, those of us leaving the cammies in the closet for now should take a quick inventory of our liberties. They tend to go AWOL during times of war – and usually never come back without a cigar box full of purple hearts and a serious case of posttraumatic stress syndrome, if at all. Operation Enduring Freedom will most likely end (or lag on indefinitely) with a net loss to the freedom it is supposedly instituted to defend and advance.
Somewhere in the afterlife, George Orwell is saying, “I told you so.”
So is economist Murray Rothbard: “War is the great excuse for mobilizing all the energies and resources of the nation, in the name of patriotic rhetoric, under the aegis and dictation of the State,” he wrote a quarter century ago. “It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and society.”
The first moves of war are like a high-carb breakfast for government. It shakes off its day-to-day constitutional restraints like a light hangover and leaps into the day, full of verve, vigor and an enlivening sense of purpose that goes beyond the usual humdrum – e.g., lying to the populace about salvaging Social Security. And, not to knock it, in some measure this is a good thing. Pictures of smoldering corpses and bomb-gutted cities are less pleasing than a forged Monet (move over “Survivor,” now there’s something realer), but certainly more enjoyable than yet another fib-fest about how Social Security is actually solvent and ready for scads of creaky-kneed Boomers, delighted that this war they get to retire instead of dodge the draft.
But these are small pleasures. The real pain is enduring the government bloat.
“War,” said Randolph Bourne, “is the health of the State.” In the name of securing the peace and security of the nation in times of real or perceived strife, the government clamps down on traditional freedoms such as free speech and the Fourth Amendment right to privacy. It restricts the economy with rationing and wage-and-price controls. And it expands domestic law enforcement to crackdown on dissidents. In all of this, the government grows, and the state swells.
To make it worse, short of some sort of catastrophic liposuction, the freedom-squelching cellulite will remain jiggling on the haunches of state for years to come, scarcely receding once the war is over.
After the War of 1812, Sen. John C. Calhoun who had been a hawk-happy saber-rattler before the war, lamented the nationalizing of policy in the country afterwards – depriving the individual states of power. Ditto and more so for the War Between the States: President Lincoln may have saved the Union, but only by stripping the rights of half its citizens. Similar sorts of changes – both institutional and attitudinal – happened as a result of the many 20th-century wars.
In his book, “Crisis and Leviathan,” economic historian Robert Higgs pins a big part of government growth on war. “Modern ‘total’ war … encourages a lowering of the sturdiest barriers – constitutional limitations and adverse public opinion – that normally obstruct the growth of government,” he writes. With those barriers down, Big Brother is free to try on bigger pants.
Asked about the role Operation Enduring Freedom will have on the government waistline, Higgs told Reason magazine, “The ultimate result will be an enlargement of the Big Brother state. We were moving that way already. This will accelerate it.” For proof, look no further than the Bush administration’s push for greater surveillance powers over the citizenry. Thus, in the name of protecting freedom, we kick Lady Liberty in the sweetbreads.
“Doublespeak” will hardly cut it when Lady Liberty reports herself assaulted by Operation Enduring Freedom, and if the Bush administration gets what it wants, it could be sooner rather than later.
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