Enduring Rehash?

WASHINGTON—The Pentagon renamed its military campaign against terrorism “Enduring Freedom,” dropping an earlier name considered offensive to Muslims.…

For one day last week, Pentagon officials used the name “Operation Infinite Justice” for the campaign in response to the September 11 hijacking attacks.

[Secretary of Defense Donald H.] Rumsfeld said the next day the administration was reconsidering because in the Islamic faith such finality is considered something provided only by Allah.

—Pauline Jelinek, “Pentagon Renames Military Campaign,” Associated Press, September 25, 2001

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I can understand not wanting to offend Muslims, but Infinite Justice (at least to my non-Muslim ears) had a manly-man action-flick ring perfect for this particular military operation.

Almost everyone, I suppose, has likened the September 11 attacks to something from the movies.  The government’s response has had its own cinematic aspects as well.  George W. Bush has morphed into Rambo by vowing to “rid the world of evil” (good luck, buddy) and into the Duke (or maybe Jon Bon Jovi) by declaring the accused mastermind of the attacks, Osama bin Laden, “wanted dead or alive.”

So after a summer of dreadful movie remakes and sequels, Bush II offers the most dreadful, the most expensive, and potentially the longest-running rehash of all—Vietnam II: Enduring Freedom, another battle against crafty third-world guerrillas, this time in Afghanistan.  (Actually, one could call this rehash Vietnam III, if one counts the Soviets’ failed 1979-88 incursion into Afghanistan.)  And let us not forget how the second Bush administration (mostly retreads from the Reagan and Bush I years) has attempted to revive the first Bush administration’s 1991 videogame of Mid-East slaughter, Desert Storm, by threatening to whack Eye-rack for allegedly helping perpetrate the September 11 carnage.  (Desert Storm II: This Time…It’s Personal!)

The second B.A. has already started indulging in Gulf War-era behavior by rejecting diplomacy (“These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion,” George W. Bush told Afghanistan during his September 20 address to Congress); and by revealing very little, if anything, to the news media, which have so far shown the same complacency and jingoist bloodthirst they showed ten years ago.  (Name one prominent dissident or peace activist given the extensive airtime the nuke-Afghanistan crowd receives.)

September 21-23, 2001 (revised September 27-29, 2001)