Caucasians with weapons of mass destruction

When Boston police described Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the marathon bombers, as a Caucasian male with curly brown hair, they used the word Caucasian to signify ‘white’. As it happens, Tsarnaev is an ethnic Chechen, which means his origins actually lie in Caucasia, a strip of mountainous land squeezed between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. ‘Caucasian’ sounds like a rigorous categorisation, but its use as a marker for pale- skinned Europeans is rooted in mumbo-jumbo that passed for science in the nineteenth century.

Anthropologists of that era loved measuring skulls, and pretending their conclusions were based on a careful study of nasal apertures, cheekbones, mandibles and maxillae, but they were basically just making stuff up. For instance, a German named Johann Blumenbach wrote that Georgians were the most beautiful people on earth  and, therefore, must have been the earliest people on the planet.

If you don’t see the logic there, it’s because there isn’t any. Blumenbach’s followers, after using their calipers on a few more crania, decided that Georgians, and Caucasians in general, were the ancestors of Europeans, but not of other racial groups. In actual fact, yesterday’s Armenians, Chechens and Georgians are the ancestors only of today’s Armenians, Chechens and Georgians, but, thanks to Blumenbach and his ilk, Americans refer to all people of European extraction as Caucasians.

Perhaps, the continued life of a 200-year-old anthropological error is harmless, and it is irrelevant what white people are called, or choose to call themselves. Nomenclature, however, can matter greatly. The Boston police have now charged Dzhokhar Tsarnaev with “unlawfully using a weapon of mass destruction”.

The phrase, ‘weapon of mass destruction’, was employed incessantly in the run-up to the last Iraq war by George Bush the Younger and his courtiers; so much so that the American Dialect society awarded it, and its abbreviation WMD, the status of Word of the Year for 2002. Through the decades of the Cold War, ‘weapons of mass destruction’ had referred exclusively to nuclear arsenals. Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, George Bush the Elder, cognisant of the changed environment, began to drag in more categories of armaments into the ambit of WMD.

The shift helped his son a decade later make a case for war against Iraq. It was generally accepted that the development of nuclear weapons by somebody as crazy and power-hungry as Saddam Hussein would be a grave threat to the world’s security. But did the possession of chemical weapons also constitute such a threat? Hardly.

Mustard gas and Sarin aren’t deadlier than conventional munitions in international combat, and it is questionable whether they are more cruel than incendiaries such as Napalm which American forces have used regularly. A nuclear weapon causes destruction of a completely different order. As Samuel Jackson said in Pulp Fiction, about an unrelated subject, “It ain’t the same f***in’ ballpark, it ain’t the same league, it ain’t even the same f***in’ sport”.

When George W Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln almost exactly a decade ago, to announce the end of major combat operations in Iraq, he must have felt smug about his use of the broad term WMD to define the threat posed by Saddam. It was clear by then that the Iraqis had no nuclear weapons and no means of acquiring any. However, it was very likely they possessed some chemical weapons.

Saddam had, after all, used a cocktail of chemical agents against Kurdish rebels and civilians in a town named Halabja back in 1988 near the end of the Iran-Iraq war. After the 1991 Gulf War led by Bush the Elder, UN weapons inspectors tried to eliminate Iraq’s chemical weapons, but it seemed certain that Saddam had preserved a small stockpile, like an addict hiding away a stash of dope from suspicious parents.

Standing on the deck of the aircraft carrier, Bush doubtless believed that, with Iraq in American hands, it was just a matter of time before Saddam’s cache was found, and the argument for a preemptive strike vindicated. That argument, remember, was based on conflating disparate kinds of armaments under the umbrella of WMD, so that the weapons which really comprised an international threat lent their gravity to those that didn’t.

However, the belligerents underestimated Saddam Hussein’s unpredictability. The Iraqi leader had allowed UN inspectors to destroy every gram of chemical munitions in the country, in the process depriving Bush and Tony Blair of the fig leaf of lawfulness their invasion would have gained from unearthing a few canisters of mustard gas.

Within the United States, meanwhile, the term WMD has acquired an even broader scope following the 9 / 11 attack. The statute in US criminal law dealing with terrorism now defines virtually every bomb as a weapon of mass destruction. A little explosive placed in a pressure cooker along with a few nuts and bolts is slapped with a label invented to describe bombs that kill civilians on a gigantic scale. Broadening a definition so much threatens to render the entire category meaningless.

What significance the term retains, though, separates the actions of the brothers Tsarnaev from gun rampages that are tragically common in the United States, and often claim more lives than the marathon bombs did. Two days after the Boston bombing, the US Senate killed legislation that would have made it slightly more difficult for Americans to buy guns. The bill was drafted after a man named Adam Lanza shot dead 26 people, including 20 children, at an elementary school in Connecticut late last year.

It seems the US will not get serious about gun control till a couple of Islamist terrorists target civilians with assault rifles instead of car, pipe, pressure cooker or shoe bombs. Frankly, I’m surprised that hasn’t happened yet.

The author is an independent journalist and an art critic.