Susan Hennessey: caught in the crossfire crossfire
I’d never heard of Susan Hennessey before last night. Then I saw, via a link on Instapundit, that she’d tweeted this about this about the tragic shoot-down by Iran of a Ukrainian plane taking off from Tehran airport:
176 completely innocent lives, killed in the crossfire of reckless escalation. Just an unbelievable tragedy. nyti.ms/2N7c81p
10.2K people are talking about this
When I saw it I thought Susan Hennessey must be some celebrity, perhaps an actress of some sort. But no. Here’s her bio: “Lawfare Executive Editor, Brookings Senior Fellow, CNN National Security and Legal Analyst, Former IC attorney.”
If you go to the replies to that tweet, you can see an almost unending stream of ridicule, richly deserved, about her misuse of the word “crossfire.” But I want to look beyond that, because what Hennessey did is quite revealing of the mind of a seemingly intelligent and supposedly well-educated leftist Trump-hater.
This is obviously not a case of a person who made a mistake because she literally doesn’t know what “crossfire” means. But just for the record, of course there was no actual crossfire here. Only Iran had been firing on American positions in Iraq, although not all that successfully. Only Iran fired at the plane. Iran, Iran, Iran doing the firing.
But when the left wants to blame someone, they trot out “the cycle of violence” (the better to make both sides seem equivalent) or “tit-for-tat” (likewise), and they arbitrarily choose a starting point that makes the side they want to call the bad guys seem like the instigators and then attribute all the bad things that happen subsequently to that side’s agency. No matter who actually does the deed.
And since the starting point is chosen not because it’s the actual starting point but because it’s the way to blame that side, it’s an almost infinitely flexible way to mount an argument. Or it might seem that way, as long as you don’t stretch it so far that it breaks, as Susan Hennessey did here.
It’s a sequence like this, and any point can be chosen along the way to highlight, depending on who needs targeting:
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
As long as Trump is an actor somewhere in the mix, they can blame him for the whole sequence and everything that follows after whatever his role was in it. And if you’re writing propaganda, as so many tweeters are (and as Susan Hennessey certainly was here), you use words like “crossfire” quite loosely for effect rather than for truth or accuracy. After all, we did something violent to some Iranian at some point, right? So yeah, “crossfire” will do, Hennessey must have thought.
And later she tries to define “crossfire” in a way she thinks makes her look less knavish and/or foolish:
There’s no “crossfire,” Iran fired ballistic missiles and then fired missiles at a civilian passenger jet. It may have been a mistake of inexperienced air defense, but that’s not crossfire. Iran shot down a civilian passenger jet.
Since I think this is a genuine attempt to be helpful (though it is hard to sort out among my mentions), I'll note that there is an alternate and extremely common usage of the term cross fire that is not related to the literal exchange of fire and is not a military term of art.
167 people are talking about this
Yeah, Susan, sure thing. But when you use “crossfire” to refer to the actual, literal shooting down of an airplane you’re not using the word that way. You’re just not, and the fact that you’re trying to make it seem as though you were only makes it even more clear how disingenuous you are being. This situation involved no firing from two points in which the line of fire crossed, nor one in which the forces of the sides met or clashed, and it most certainly was not the rapid or heated exchange of words.
But “crossfire” seemed to Hennessey such a useful way to look at it that it’s been hard for her to give it up.
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