Bad Cliches

The Weekly Standard's Matt Labash has an article with an important anti-propaganda message:

The War on Terror's Newest Bad Cliche
" . . . or the terrorists will have won" is replaced by a new, equally-annoying trope.
by Matt Labash
11/26/2003 12:00:00 AM


SOME DAYS, when the after party in Iraq isn't going so well--which is to say, most days--I'm put in mind of the Bush administration's admonition to be sunny-side-up journalists, to eliminate the negative, to accentuate the positive. God knows I try.

...Now, the most fashionable pre-fab rationalization to use when the news isn't going as swimmingly as we want it to, is to select a place in Iraq, then a corresponding place in America. If the two places start with the same letter, all the better. Next, state baldly that no matter how lousy things are going, you'd rather fight the terrorists / Baathists / whoever-it-is-we're-fighting in the first location, rather than the second. Lastly, sit back with a self-satisfied smile, as if that settles the matter.

...MORE CLOYING, however, is the tendency of Those Who Would Rather Fight to want to fight the terrorists in places that begin with the same letter as the places they don't want to fight, thus making their formulations annoyingly alliterative, like a bad Maureen Dowd column. The Boston Herald, for instance, wants to fight in Baghdad, "rather than mopping up after mayhem in Boston." A Fox commentator prefers "the Middle East so you won't have to fight them in the Midwest." New York governor George Pataki wants our troops fighting the terrorists "on the streets of Baghdad," rather than our firefighters fighting them "on the streets of Brooklyn." Representative J.D. Hayworth would rather "see the fight in Tikrit than in Tucson or Tacoma." And Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scores a fighting hat trick, since he'd prefer the fight to go down in Baghdad rather than "in Boston or in Baltimore or Boise." Senator Kit Bond does Rumsfeld one better, wishing the fight to commence in Baghdad, "rather than Boston or Boise or Baldwin, Missouri, or Belton, Missouri."

Once you get the hang of the Where You'd Like to Fight The Terrorists game, it's easy to play, and lots of fun. Let's try it. Match the Iraqi cities where you'd rather fight the terrorists on the left to the U.S. cities where you don't want to fight the terrorists on the right. Then, check out the answer key below and see how good a terrorist-fighter you are.

(A) Umm Qasr (B) Nasiriyah (C) Karbala (D) Basra (E) Tikrit

(1) Kansas City, MO (2) Tifton, GA (3) Umnak, AL (4) Nacogdoches, TX (5) Beaver Falls, PA

A little practice, and you'll know exactly what to do if you find yourself down-wind on some Sunday morning gasbag show. Whenever the Iraq catastrophe of the day is brought up, just look the moderator in the eye, and tell him that you'd rather fight the terrorists in Salman Pak than in the Salmon River of Idaho. That you'd rather fight the terrorists in Safwan than San Antonio. (I've lived in San Antonio--great place to get Mexican, no place to fight terrorists.) Better Berkeley than Baghdad. Or vice versa. That one's a toss-up.

IT'S SIMPLE REALLY, to know where you'd rather fight the terrorists. It's considerably harder to fight them. Which is why this hoary cliché needs to be retired once and for all. For there's two things to keep in mind when declaring where in Iraq you'd rather fight the terrorists.

The first, is that we're not altogether sure we are fighting terrorists, in the al-Qaeda sense of the word.

...The second thing to remember, for most of the people declaring where they'd rather fight the terrorists, is that they are not personally doing much of the fighting. Who's to say if you were coming up on the 11th month of your deployment in a hostile country where the natives, instead of showing gratitude, showed you the business-end of an RPG-launcher, that you might not enjoy fighting the terrorists in a place where you could claim home-field advantage, have a warm bed, a cold beer, and the occasional conjugal visit from a woman whose name you could pronounce.

That's all fun and good. But, the real problem with the cliché is that it's a logical fallacy. Fighting terrorists "there" is simply no preventive for fighting them "here" - it all depends on where they strike. That's the thing about terrorism. You may preempt an invasion, but to preempt a terrorist strike is an entirely different matter. We've done neither in the case of invading Iraq. The Iraqis are not the terrorists. We are not fighting terrorists in Iraq.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.