Final Solutions, Starting Problems

This blog is genetically timid. It's inherited the same reticence as its author when it comes to all things political. But there comes a time when even the mouse must puff up and speak out. The situation in Gaza has reached an embarrassingly deplorable point. Even if I allow for the fact that I'm reading the Guardian every day, it's difficult to fudge casualty numbers. It's also difficult to believe that the IDF could have thought the rhetoric of the 'targeted campaign' would ever fly. Gaza is such a densely populated region that war on this sort of scale will always be indiscriminate (assuming war is ever discriminate). Bombs, even the most clinical high-techs, aren't known to respect the difference between soldier and civilian when they're breathing the same air.

If you want to have a look at a masterfully sanitised version of the war, check out the IDF website. No limbless Palestinian children pinned up here. Of course, a conflict of such immemorial long-standing as this one features a host of powerful arguments on both sides, and it would be presumptuous for me, an armchair left media reader, to weigh in too heavily on either end of the scale. Living day to day with the odd rocket dropped in your backyard is likewise no way to be. The grander scheme of the crisis seems by far the most intractable conflict of the modern world (apart from those in Africa I'm rhetorically overlooking). Recrimination without fatigue: the blame can always go one step further back. Sixty years of intermittent strife is a long, long line of recruits clambering for inclusion in each side's justifying story. And the longer it goes on, the more justification available. Yuck.

Anyway, I'm not setting out for an old fashioned Israel-bashing here. But I am wanting to draw attention to (and hopefully invite some elucidation from the more informed sector) a convention of war, the continuing use of which I find absolutely perverse: the code name. 'Operation Cast Lead'. What the hell is that? Highly condensed war poetry? I'm utterly baffled as to what function this WWII hangover still serves in a world which has seen the photographic visions of war many, many times.

If the purpose of these tags is euphemistic, aiming to make armed conflict more palatable to a jumpy public - a.k.a. propaganda - it strikes me as the feeblest attempt at re-branding possible. Or maybe the issue is more about mimesis (note the euphemism 'theatre of war'), in our age of the bloated war-movie genre: the more it sounds like a film title, the less real, and hence less threatening, it will be. The politics have to be assessed for each individual name I suppose. Let's take 'Operation Desert Storm'. The idea of violence is definitely contained in that title. But the key difference is that it's made out as a neutral, natural violence; an inevitable force as opposed to man-made carnage. Storms come and go - nothing to be done. Very crafty, U.S. Government P.R. department. I'd give anything to sit in at a meeting where code names are decided upon. I imagine it would go something like this:

Kevin: How about 'operation storm in a teacup'?

Brad: Mmm, good, but what about 'operation dessert in a teacup'?

Bill: I like it...but maybe if we combined the two? 'Operation dessert storm'?

Kevin: Too abstract and creamy...I've got it! The theatre will be a desert, so 'operation desert storm'.

President: Good work boys. You've all got promotions and health plans.

If 'Desert Storm' treads a fine line between acknowledging the masculine danger of the enterprise and disclaiming responsibility for this danger, then what the fuck does 'Operation Cast Lead' do? Make us think of flying bits of metal that maim and kill people? That's certainly what I think of when such a code name is applied to a WAR! The usage of 'cast' is, I think, supposed to be like in 'cast iron'. But instead it sounds like the IDF are chucking lumps of one of earth's heaviest substances through someone's window. This is a really, really unhappy choice of name for a campaign. If they can't even create clean, unambiguous nomenclature for their war, chances are the reality will be a whole lot messier.

Though I'm not a foremost (or even rearmost) authority on WWII, I presume code names were introduced for security purposes: plans like 'Operation Kill Hitler by Sneaking Poison into his Stein' had to be cryptically renamed for obvious reasons. But in an age when people have access to relatively reliable information through all sorts of news media, and where everyone knows what the code name refers to, what's the point of obscuring, apart from creating the most pathetically blatant propaganda? A related question might be: what would the Israeli government call this war if 'Operation Cast Lead' were jettisoned? The War in Gaza? Which kind of name is also politically loaded - like the 'War in Iraq' - because it identifies a location, but not an enemy. Even prepositions are charged when it comes to war. If an abstract name is rejected in favour of a more literal one, we're confronted with the depressing realisation that all names are code names: every possibility obfuscates and emphasises according to the namer's agenda.

In any case, the namer's agenda isn't very well serviced by 'Operation Cast Lead'. If there is some positive connotation I'm missing, I'd love to know. And if, on a completely different level, there are people in Israel who willfully buy this euphemistic spin (the more poorly thought out the spin, the more outrageous that it could be bought!), perhaps their leaden minds could be cast back to the worst euphemism in history, indeed a part of Israel's genesis: the Final Solution. That shuddering disjunct between title and event stands as a lasting reminder of how pernicious an ideological tool the code name can be. The first step is to make the effort to look through it. The next, hopelessly remote, is to cut off the referent at the source: stop the war.