Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf

This article is reprinted by kind permission of the author.It first appeared on the eve of the first Gulf War in 1991. Metaphors can kill. The discourse over whether we should go to war in the Gulf is a panorama of metaphor. Secretary of State Baker sees Saddam as ‘sitting on our economic lifeline’. President Bush sees him as having a ‘stranglehold’ on our economy. General Schwartzkopf characterizes the occupation of Kuwait as a ‘rape’ that is ongoing. The President says that the US is in the Gulf to ‘protect freedom, protect our future, and protect the innocent’, and that we must ‘push Saddam Hussein back’. Saddam is seen as Hitler. It is vital, literally vital, to understand just what role metaphorical thought is playing in bringing us to the brink of war. Metaphorical thought, in itself, is neither good nor bad; it is simply commonplace and inescapable. Abstractions and enormously complex situations are routinely understood via metaphor. Indeed, there is an extensive, and mostly unconscious, system of metaphor that we use automatically and unreflectively to understand complexities and abstractions. Part of this system is devoted to understanding international relations and war. We now know enough about this system to have an idea of how it functions. The metaphorical understanding of a situation functions in two parts. First, there is a widespread, relatively fixed set of metaphors that structure how we think. For example, a decision to go to war might be seen as a form of cost-benefit analysis, where war is justified when the costs of going to war are less than the costs of not going to war. Second, there is a set of metaphorical definitions that allow one to apply such a metaphor to a particular situation. In this case, there must be a definition of ‘cost’, including a means of comparing relative ‘costs’. The use of a metaphor with a set of definitions becomes pernicious when it hides realities in a harmful way. It is important to distinguish what is metaphorical from what is not. Pain, dismemberment, death, starvation, and the death and injury of loved ones are not metaphorical. They are real and in a war, they could afflict tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of real human beings, whether Iraqi, Kuwaiti, or American.