Lileks comments (among other great things–go read today’s warbleat) that NPR was running BBC yesterday. Yup. I listened to it as I drove past San Luis Obispo yesterday afternoon. I found it difficult to take it seriously–one of the many depredations caused by a misspent youth of watching and listening to Monty Python.
The Brits like to say that Yanks lack a sense of irony. Keep that thought in mind as I relate this one bit.
It was an interview between the oh-so-serious Beeb commentator, an Arabic language expert (complete with Arabic accent) and a Professor of English from Cardiff. The topic? The language being used by the two sides to describe the war, and their respective adversaries.
It starts with a tape of Saddam in his nightgown, in which he calls the President, among other things, a donkey.
Lead question to Mr Arabic expert: “So, is this bad?”
I laughed out loud at the question. We’re at war, people are redecorating with cellophane and duct tape, the terror alert is orange verging on blood red, but this idiot’s worried about a loon in the Middle East comparing the president to a barnyard animal.
But he took it seriously, of course.
“Oh, yes, yes, it is the greatest of insults. There is no lower animal that one can compare an opponent with. It is worse even than a pig. Clearly Saddam is very angry at Mr. Bush.”
But then he goes on to say, or at least imply, that it was in response to a grave American “insult.”
“Last night, they said they made a ‘decapitating strike.’ But what does it mean to decapitate. It is like cutting off the head of a snake. They are calling the Iraqi people a snake, and of course, when you cut off the head, the body dies, so it is obviously a lie that the Americans are not making war on the Iraqi people.”
Then our moderator, without challenging this lunacy in any way, turns to the English English professor. “So, what do you think?”
“Well, they say truth is the first casualty of war, don’t they? Of course, what’s really the first casualty is language, the medium, the conveyer of truth, as it were.”
“Yes, ‘decapitation’ is a euphemism for something else, in this case assassination.”
It goes on in this nonsensical and ridiculous vein for several minutes.
Clearly, Saddam has nothing left but insults, but to think that any American is insulted when he calls Bush a donkey is laughable. I’ve always heard how flowery and eloquent Arabic is, but if that’s the best he has, he couldn’t insult himself out of wad of wet toilet paper. Tim Blair could insult him and his entire family into the middle of next week, probably in his sleep.
The Pentagon’s use of the word “decapitate” is not intended as an insult–it’s a precise description of our intent–to take out the brains of the Iraqi military organization. Yes, Saddam was a target, but that’s because he’s in charge of the military. In a war, the supreme commander is a perfectly legitimate target. As it happens, President Bush is similarly a legitimate target in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, and if the Iraqis were to miraculously come up with some way to kill him, it wouldn’t be an assassination–it would be a means of prosecuting the war.
Assassination is the murder of someone for political purposes, not to accomplish a war aim. If Iraq had a head of state separate from its military head, the latter would be a legitimate target, but not the former.
But one wouldn’t expect a professor of English to understand international law, or an expert on Arabic to understand military terminology, particularly one who doesn’t seem to understand American culture and believes that we, like Arabs, achieve war aims through insult.
Not, that is, unless one is the BBC.