Enemy Tactics

"An American soldier was wounded and Iraqis also by the enemy who fired a flareinto an ammunition dump." CNN early summary of a huge explosion of ammunition in residential Baghdad, 26April 2003

Who is the enemy? 'A person whohates another and wishes and tries to injure him -- synonym: opponent.' Am I George W. Bush's enemy because Ioppose his war policies mounted in the name of freedom? I do oppose him though I do not wish to injure himpersonally. But I do wish and will try to 'take him out' politically. Is my desire murderous? Will theSecret Service check on me? How real and dangerous are words like 'enemy'?

In war the word 'enemy' licenses corporeal killing. You may, perhaps should, kill theenemy who by definition is one who hates you and wishes to injure or kill you. A soldier's personal identityis effaced. He or she can't define the enemy or disagree with the leader. The job is to fight the enemy andthat label 'enemy' makes violence become self-defense, as well as authorized by your country. The license tokill usually comes from religion (kill the infidels) or the state (kill terrorists or evil regimes). Privatelicenses to kill are discouraged. (You shouldn't kill members of ethnic or racial or gender groups youdespise, or family members who irritate you, or most anybody else unless you have a very good and legallydefensible reason.) The enemy is the killable other. The US soldier who early in the Iraq War rolled grenadesinto his officers' tents violated the rules by changing enemies.

We often try to draw distinctions about killing in war. In Iraq we wanted to kill themost hostile soldiers-the Republican Guard and Fedayeen. We often let the regular conscripted army soldiers goif they would abandon their weapons and hostility and soldier status. We said we desired not to kill and maimchildren and innocent civilians. When we did kill them we argued that it was a mistake or due to the brutalityof warfare or the enemy's fault. The enemy, we said, lacked our scruples and deliberately imperiled civiliansby placing armaments near them. We blamed the viciousness of the enemy who used innocents as human shields fortheir own hostilities. And, mostly, ultimately, we blamed the enemy because their evil provoked us to war.

When the ammunition dump exploded in residential Baghdad, the guarding Americansoldiers tried to help dig out the people buried in the rubble, and the crowd wouldn't let them. The Americansand the Iraqis couldn't speak each others' languages and there were no translators handy. So the soldierscouldn't argue that an Iraqi enemy had deliberately caused the violence, not the soldiers. In one bit of newsfootage an American soldier yells to his captain 'They don't understand' and the captain responds ' I knowthey don't understand. Neither do I.' The Iraqis are later reported to be saying that they had warned thesoldiers to move the arsenal, that babies are buried alive.

The soldiers looked like an enemy; the angry crowd looked like an enemy too. Furtherviolence was avoided because the soldiers withdrew. In many similar scenes soldiers sometimes shoot and crowdssometimes murder. Not just in Iraq but in Israel and elsewhere.

Could language have calmed this scene? With translators could soldiers and crowd havefound a common enemy-an outsider enemy who wished to injure them both-whom they could blame and then worktogether to help the victims?

Violence can erupt on a word. Yell 'enemy' in war and people often die. Talk shows andpoliticians pontificate that Madonna and the Dixie Chicks and Hollywood figures aided the enemy in wartime bytheir opposition to our government's policy. The Congressional cafeteria in Washington serves 'freedom toast'and 'freedom fries' to verbally attack and eliminate the French for their words against our war.

This sense is not the children's rhyme that sticks and stones will break our bones butnames will never hurt us. It's more 'them's fightin' words.' If words construct the enemy they're thebeginning of war. How do we go from naming enemies -- terrorist, tyrant, evil -- to killing them? How do we movefrom opposition to attack? 'The time for talk is over,' Powell and Rumsfeld and Bush announced. 'The enemymeans us harm and is moving secretly against us,' they said. 'We risk terrorist attack if we do not attack,'they warned. We go from words to war by ceasing talks and beginning bombing. We also go by abstraction -- wedon't kill men and women and children and cities but the enemy and evil regimes. We go by justifying our angeras self-protection and revenge. We go by collapsing present time into future intention: 'war is about peace.'

We go by defining and redefining words and staying on message -- shutting down otherlanguage. We wage a war of words as well as of brute force. The US soldier who screamed at an angry Iraqicrowd "We're here for your fuckin' freedom" needed a translator. Americans have always been fond ofthe supreme court of the gun. In many a western, Law and Order and Education need force to protect them. Yetthe words are what make the actions moral.

Words support ambivalence just as they construct it. An enemy today might have been afriend yesterday or become one tomorrow. Donald Rumsfeld met with Saddam Hussein twenty years ago and gave himweapons against Iran. Word language allows for another time, a different tense. It admits contradiction andparadox. Language can entertain the idea of loving your enemy, the idea of transcending or changing yourdefinitions.

Language also allows conflict without physical killing. We can oppose verbally and notattack physically. We can articulate intense anger and refrain from bloody follow-up. We can make mentalwarfare and live to fight again and tell the tale. We can change our enemies and have new fights. In corporealwarfare we lose language and ambivalence. We cannot heal wounds of the flesh with words or raise the dead.That's what the children's rhyme means -- the domains of sticks and stones and words are different. We try toteach children not to hit but to talk.

When the soldiers tried by sign language to signify that they weren't responsible forthe carnage at the Baghdad arsenal they were not understood. When the crowd screamed the soldiers weremurderers they were not understood either. Were they enemies?

President Bush is angry at Kofi Anan of the UN for calling the US the occupying forcerather than the liberating force. President Bush is angry at world leaders calling the US unjust war mongersrather than freedom fighters. Presidents get angry and name their conflicts 'Just Cause' and 'Iraqi Freedom'not 'Kill the Bastards' or 'Smoke the Evil Ones.' They do this to distinguish brutal acts of the righteousfrom brutal acts of the evil. This is called rationalizing or spinning or lying or delusion. The acts aresimilar -- bombing for example.

Labeling alone changes the symmetry of the acts of 9/11 and the shock and awebombing of Baghdad. We meant to inflict terror through the shock and awe of bombing brute force. We not onlythrilled at our explosive might, we boasted we were the most stunning military force in all human history. Butwe weren't monsters because we meant well and our motives were pure. We were good and the evil regime weswaggered to dazzle was not. They were brutal, cut out tongues, killed, gassed and impoverished their ownpeople, swaggered and swilled scotch and had mistresses. We said we respected Islam, loved the Iraqi people,were bringing democratic freedoms. And we just had to make war because the evil ones wouldn't change any otherway.

Most of the world has trouble with these distinctions. The real language that's beingspoken is brute force. You can speak before you bomb and say you don't want to hurt anybody and you can speakafter you bomb and say you're sorry. The bomb has a different language, one which does not support ambivalenceor tense change. Americans don't face their own violence, not the deep psychological kind, not the obvioushistorical kind. When we railed about weapons of mass destruction, no one pointed out that like the crazyShakespearean kings we're terrified of them because we've done the thing we fear. Americans don't look at thefootage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombing, and Japan is no longer the enemy. Our myth is that violenceis changed by good intentions, that it can be cleansing. Some will say it's a religious error, others thatit's the sad Darwinian truth of survival.

Does it matter what we say? Osama bin Laden says he's a slave of God and is on adivine mission to revenge insult to Allah and his people. George Bush says he's on a divine mission to rid theworld of evil. Both bomb. Do they differ? In enemy tactics, they are enemy twins -- resorting to force, blamingtheir enemy, claiming righteousness, and wreaking savage damage.

Diane Christian is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at University at Buffalo.