Metaphor and War, Again

By George Lakoff, AlterNet. Posted March 18, 2003.

Metaphors can kill.

That's how I began a piece on the first Gulf War back in 1990, just before the war began. Many of those metaphorical ideas are back, but within a very different and more dangerous context. Since Gulf War II is due to start any day, perhaps even tomorrow, it might be useful to take a look before the action begins at the metaphorical ideas being used to justify Gulf War II.

One of the most central metaphors in our foreign policy is that A Nation Is A Person. It is used hundreds of times a day, every time the nation of Iraq is conceptualized in terms of a single person, Saddam Hussein. The war, we are told, is not being waged against the Iraqi people, but only against this one person. Ordinary American citizens are using this metaphor when they say things like, "Saddam is a tyrant. He must be stopped." What the metaphor hides, of course, is that the 3000 bombs to be dropped in the first two days will not be dropped on that one person. They will kill many thousands of the people hidden by the metaphor, people that according to the metaphor we are not going to war against.

The Nation As Person metaphor is pervasive, powerful, and part of an elaborate metaphor system. It is part of an International Community metaphor, in which there are friendly nations, hostile nations, rogue states, and so on. This metaphor comes with a notion of the national interest: Just as it is in the interest of a person to be healthy and strong, so it is in the interest of a Nation-Person to be economically healthy and militarily strong. That is what is meant by the "national interest."

In the International Community, peopled by Nation-Persons, there are Nation-adults and Nation-children, with Maturity metaphorically understood as Industrialization. The children are the "developing" nations of the Third World, in the process of industrializing, who need to be taught how to develop properly and to be disciplined (say, by the International Monetary Fund) when they fail to follow instructions. "Backward" nations are those that are "underdeveloped." Iraq, despite being the cradle of civilization, is seen via this metaphor as a kind of defiant armed teenage hoodlum who refuses to abide by the rules and must be "taught a lesson."

The international relations community adds to the Nation As Person metaphor what is called the "Rational Actor Model." The idea here is that it is irrational to act against your interests and that nations act as if they were "rational actors" -- individual people trying to maximize their "gains' and "assets" and minimize their "costs" and "losses." In Gulf War I, the metaphor was applied so that a country's "assets" included its soldiers, materiel, and money. Since the US lost few of those "assets" in Gulf War I, the war was reported, just afterward in the NY Times Business section, as having been a "bargain." Since Iraqi civilians were not our assets, they could not be counted as among the "losses" and so there was no careful public accounting of civilian lives lost, people maimed, and children starved or made seriously ill by the war or the sanctions that followed it. Estimates vary from half a million to a million or more. However, public relations was seen to be a US asset: excessive slaughter reported on in the press would be bad PR, a possible loss. These metaphors are with us again. A short war with few US casualties would minimize costs. But the longer it goes on, the more Iraqi resistance and the more US casualties, the less the US would appear invulnerable and the more the war would appear as a war against the Iraqi people. That would be a high "cost."

According to the Rational Actor Model, countries act naturally in their own best interests -- preserving their assets, that is, their own populations, their infrastructure, their wealth, their weaponry, and so on. That is what the US did in Gulf War I and what it is doing now. But Saddam Hussein, in Gulf War I, did not fit our government's Rational Actor model. He had goals like preserving his power in Iraq and being an Arab hero just for standing up to the Great Satan. Though such goals might have their own rationality, they are "irrational" from the model's perspective.

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