It Depends What The Meaning Of “War” Is

Yesterday, Kerry said:

“We don’t want to go to war in Syria either. It is not what we are here to ask. The President is not asking you to go to war.”

Yes. He. Is.

We have so degraded the seriousness of armed conflict against other regimes and countries that we no longer regard massive bombing campaigns, destruction of other people’s infrastructure, and deaths of civilians and enemy soldiers as somehow “not war”. And it is this very logic that enables this war machine to present itself ludicrously as “defense”. The war in Syria has nothing whatsoever to do with the territorial integrity of the US. We are emphatically under no threat at all. Which is why this elective war – without UN support – is so deeply corrosive of this country’s democracy. Peter Beinart notes:

The United States is reportedly considering launching several hundred Tomahawk missiles against various Syrian military units and installations. General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has acknowledged that “there is a probability for collateral damage.” The Obama administration, in other words, is planning to kill and maim an unspecified number of Syrians in order to deter Bashir al-Assad from again using chemical weapons or to uphold the credibility of a potential American military strike against Iran. That’s war.

So how can Kerry say it’s not? Because the ships launching the Tomahawks will be far from Syria, and thus apparently impervious to Syrian retaliation. War, in other words, is what happens when other nations kill Americans, not the other way around.

Larison observes that this abuse of the English language is nothing new:

This was the fiction that the administration promoted during the Libyan war, when it offered the pathetic defense that the U.S. was not involved in hostilities because there was no real chance that the Libyan government’s forces could harm any of the Americans participating in the bombing of Libya. If U.S. involvement in a war is lopsided enough, and if it can be waged from a great enough distance, it isn’t counted as war or “hostilities.” This is a risible argument, but it is one that Kerry was quite comfortable making yesterday. Perhaps he assumes that most members of Congress think of these things in the same way, or perhaps he has convinced himself that the U.S. can carry out acts of war without waging war and can commence hostilities against another state without being engaged in hostilities.