I propose a corollary, Blackbeard’s Law: As a discussion of the Iraq War grows longer (and more heated), it becomes more and more likely that someone will invoke the phrase “blood and treasure.” This olde-tyme expression, popular with Jefferson and Monroe in the 18th and 19th centuries—and Cromwell long before that—first crept into the Iraq debate a couple of years ago and quickly went viral. B&T has now become the go-to cliché for journalists, bloggers, politicians or anyone else who finds himself getting clobbered in an Iraq argument and is groping around for a little rhetorical juice to disarm the other side.
Blackbeard’s Law was in ample evidence at this week’s Iraq hearings, where senators seemed helpless to resist its lure.
John McCain used the phrase in his soliloquy defending the war: “But the consequences of failure, I’m convinced, are … a greater sacrifice of American blood and treasure.”
Arguing for the other side, Chuck Hagel artfully deployed it to punctuate his opposition to the American occupation. “Is it worth it, the continued investment of American blood and treasure?”
Susan Collins did one better, taking the phrase and making it her own with a nice example of free-verse repetition. “How long should we continue to commit American troops, American lives, American treasure?”
If C-Span had sponsored a “Blood and Treasure” drinking game, everyone in the hearing room would have been drunk before noon.
It wasn’t just the senators who couldn’t get enough B&T. The star of the hearing, Gen. David Petraeus, solemnly testified that even though he believes we can still win in Iraq, “there clearly are limits to the blood and treasure that we can expend.” Not to be outdone, his sidekick, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, lamented, “Our country has given a great deal in blood and treasure to stabilize the situation in Iraq.…” (Crocker’s performance was memorable for another show-stopping war euphemism, when he referred to bombed-out Iraqi towns as “post-kinetic environments.”)
As a rhetorical tool, B&T is admirably versatile. Either side can use it with equal effectiveness. The trick is to wait for just the right moment to unleash the phrase, usually when you and your sparring partner are good and angry and you’ve already run through the familiar arsenal of Iraq clichés that must be hauled out in any conversation about the war. (On the one side: “We’ve got to fight them over there …” On the other: “The whole war is based on lies …”) That’s when you—and you’ve got to act quick, because you know the other guy is reaching for the same holster—affect a slightly condescending tone of sad, world-weary resignation, and fire: “No one among us can deny that this noble/futile conflict has cost us much in blood and treasure.” So true. So smart. Duel over.
Even the White House is getting in on a little B&T. Briefing reporters, press secretary Tony Snow lectured that in the long run, failure in Iraq would “require a much greater expenditure of U.S. blood and treasure.”
Expenditure? There’s an interesting word choice (we’re sorry, but we had to expend your son’s life in Iraq), and it says a lot about why B&T has become so popular. Like all euphemisms it puts comforting distance between ourselves and the violence in Iraq by making something brutal and ugly sound lofty and poetic. Death and destruction is depressing. But expenditures, that’s just spreadsheets. B&T is all about making the war easier for us here at home.
Try this: Next time you hear someone use “blood and treasure” to make a point for or against the war, substitute the words “dead Americans and money.” It has a whole different ring to it.
