George W. Bush wasn't lying about Iraq after all, and those of us who said he was, owe him an apology. Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction. We just didn't read the small print.
When President Bush said in a speech, "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," we thought that he was talking about nuclear weapons. And many of us didn't believe him.
When vice-president Dick Cheney assured us: "There is no doubt Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends ... and against us," we just assumed he was lying as usual.
And when Colin Powell, the secretary of state, told the UN Security Council, "Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction ... We know that Iraqi government officials ... have hidden prohibited items in their homes," we thought he meant nukes and poison gas and nasty biological agents. Poor Colin, we thought. A soldier, too gullible for his own good.
But we were all wrong. The real threat was pressure cookers, and there were thousands of them in homes of Iraqi officials. We shouldn't be too hard on the Bush gang for not making full disclosure of what they meant by "weapons of mass destruction." Imagine how silly Powell would have looked at the UN if he had shown a pressure cooker.
These penitential thoughts are inspired by the charge brought against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving brother of the two young Chechen-Americans who detonated two pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon last week. It was a wicked deed that brought great sorrow to many families -- but are pressure cookers really "weapons of mass destruction?"
The U.S. Department of Justice thinks so. On Monday, it charged Tsarnaev with "using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against persons and property." Not a nuclear weapon, or poison gas, or a plague, but a homemade bomb that killed three people.
The U.S. government's definition of a "weapon of mass destruction," it turns out, is quite different from the one we ordinary mortals use. It covers almost any explosive device.
And, of course, American bombs, grenades, mines and small rockets and missiles are not "weapons of mass destruction." Otherwise we would have to accept that President Barack Obama signs off on the use of drone-delivered weapons of mass destruction on the guilty and innocent alike in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen almost every morning.
What's going on here is another manifestation of what Americans themselves call "American exceptionalism." In this context, it means that killing Americans, especially for political reasons, is a special crime that calls for special terms and special punishment. It's the same logic used to justify imprisoning people indefinitely without trial and even torturing them in the endless "war on terror."
Americans are playing the same games with words and meanings that every great power has used to justify its actions since the dawn of time. Lewis Carroll nailed it a century and a half ago in Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice's adventures in Wonderland:
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."
Gwynne Dyer is a Canadian independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. He has served in the Canadian, American, and British navies. He is based in London, England
Source URL
|
Print This 
Print This 