Operation Inherent Resolve: a war by any other name would smell as foul
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Version 0 of 1. What if they gave a war and nobody tweeted? The United States faced this problem up until Wednesday, when it finally named its current bombing war against Isis, Isil or the Islamic State – which already had at least three names, which was three more than we had. The war is now called Operation Inherent Resolve, which, hey, look at that: two nouns and an adjective. The Pentagon’s 22nd Nomenclative Division wasn’t horsin’ around with that one. Naming a war is important, because if you don’t, it’s difficult to build your #brand and #virality. Isis was, frankly, kicking our butts on the strength of Archer references and Egyptian god stuff. They even declared a caliphate, and everyone panicked and talked about that. What a rollout. You go to war with the global theocracy you want, not the sociopathic teen knockout game club you have, and let America’s imagination do the hard work for you. Meanwhile, average citizens were stuck trying to come up with a name for what we were doing on their own. That doesn’t get #sticky or #leverage operational #identity. Technically, people could have called it, “What The Heck Are We Even Doing?” or “More Of This Again?” or “Dude, Where’s My Humvee?” The last one was even real. So Operation Inherent Resolve it is, and boy does that do some lifting. For instance: According to CENTCOM officials, the name INHERENT RESOLVE is intended to reflect the unwavering resolve and deep commitment of the U.S. and partner nations in the region and around the globe to eliminate the terrorist group ISIL and the threat they pose to Iraq, the region and the wider international community. It’s tempting to think the INHERENT RESOLVE part is the one that does all the work, but that’s just air. As many Twitter wags and I noted, the operation’s nom de guerre basically offers synonyms for sounding determined. You could call it Operation Stubborn Intrinsic, Operation Stick-to-Itiveness, Operation Keep Doing, or Operation Put Your Hands On Your Hips, Stand With Your Legs Apart, Look Mad And Flex Just A Little In Case Your Neighbor’s Wife Is Watching. Presumably while you frown at a busted lawnmower or something. Basically, this is Operation More Of The Same But With A Proper Noun For It Now So We Have To Use It. The real heavy lifting is something we’ve all long since become accustomed to: the clinical, limited nature of a word like “Operation”. We can’t help but think of surgery, whether the anodyne and totally sanitized children’s game, or at the very least the focused, task-oriented medical procedure with a clear timetable. An operation has a beginning, middle and end. It has an objective with clearly measured outcomes. Not a single one of those criteria apply to Operation Inherent Resolve. Nor, for that matter, did they apply to Operation Enduring Freedom, a 13-year war in Afghanistan (still winning!) that grew to include the Philippines, the horn of Africa, central America and various other theatres somehow.Now the whole war is the operation, amorphous to the point of absurdity. Why don’t we just put the operations of Inherent Resolve under the umbrella of Operation Enduring Freedom? Does our freedom not endure in Iraq and Syria and wherever else Inherent Resolve might lead? Is it even wise to suggest that there is a place and time at which our freedom might not endure? And what’s wrong with Operation Iraqi Freedom? Apart from arbitrarily ending it earlier, does that not still apply?The best name for this – this ecstasy of Whatever This Is – came from General John Abizaid and was popularized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld back in 2006: The Long War. It was perfect. It told you nothing about the countries involved, the objectives or the means. It just told you the duration, which was refreshingly accurate. Even six years ago, journalists were taking depressing cues from fiction (which were themselves inspired by Vietnam) and calling it “The Forever War”. Now it’s “Endless”. Add crusader rhetoric, and it can be “Eternal” next. Rumsfeld said: I think what we’re trying to do is to just simply tell the truth. And the truth is that just as the Cold War lasted a long time, this war is something that is not going to go away. It’s not going to be settled with a signing ceremony on the USS Missouri. There you had it: like the Cold War, this could last for the next 45 years. You were basically never again not going to be at war, so get used to it and prepare to budget accordingly. “The Long War” was too on the nose. Retrospectively, it seems stunning that it didn’t die the moment it escaped someone’s lips in a committee. Historically, we convince ourselves that wars will end any second now. All those soldiers embarking from Dover in 1914 were sure they’d be home by Christmas. Instead, Rumsfeld said we’d be here long enough to raise generations who know nothing else. One can only assume he’d stood up for 8-10 hours that day and gone a little hennypenny. We’ve learned our lessons. Keep it vague, leave the objectives out of it. You could see the nasty blowback from that last bit on Tuesday night. The New York Times reported on the long-term health effects of chemical weapons on American soldiers. Naturally, the right went totally ape, crowing, See, we said they were there the entire time. But they did the same thing back in 2006, when the existence of those WMDs was reported the first time. Then, as now, the gloating melted away after pretty much one news cycle, because they weren’t nuclear, and most were of corroded pre-1991 vintage and couldn’t be ballistically deployed anymore. Also, some of them were designed by us and many manufactured by our western allies, back when Saddam Hussein was Our Man in the Middle East, and people like Rumsfeld shook hands with him. And it turned out that those blistering gases and nerve agents mostly harmed our people because they physically handled them, which lowers the threshold of existential WMD threat to the level of something like “touching spoiled meat with open cuts on your hands”. That’s the problem with making your case on WMDs: you need WMDs, and you need them to be the right ones. You need to find them when you say you will, in the conditions you predict, and you have to release that information regardless of whether it embarrasses you. There’s a whole habeas corpus vibe to the proceeding, and we don’t really do that sort of thing well anymore. The Bush administration had the right idea – a military clock right once per day – when it bailed on WMDs entirely and argued that the purpose of the Iraq War to bestow freedom on the Iraqis and watch the benefits trickle down to everyone, and the Obama administration has been wise to keep playing this tune. What’s the goal? Freedom for somebody. How much and for how long? For as long as it takes to get it and for as long as it needs to endure. How do we make that happen? With resolve. Which kind? The inherent kind. Bing, bang, boom, there it is. What part of that isn’t clear? |