March 22, 2011--What's In A Name?

Overlord was the name the Allied Supreme Command assigned to the invasion of France during the climatic months of the Second World War. Desert Storm is what the Pentagon called the invasion of Iraq back in the days of George H. W. Bush's presidency. His son's version, Operation Iraqi Freedom should have tipped us off that Bush and Company were more interested in regime change and nation building than looking for weapons of mass distraction. If the latter had been their actual intention, they would have come with something like Operation Yellow Cake.

I have no idea why military leaders seem to feel the need to employ descriptive and/or funky names for their operations. I suppose in the old days they spoke about Overlord-this or Overlord-that in the hope that the Germans would think they were talking about feudalistic issues. I suspect, though, that the Jerries were not fooled and knew it referred to the invasion of the continent though they were in fact fooled about the size and location of the invasion. But not by its code name.

This naming of military operations has a long history and Americans and Western powers are far from the only ones inclined to come up with them.

Speaking about World War II, the German's devised their own code names:

Feuerzauber ("Fire Magic") was the Teutonic-poetic name of their plan to transfer airplanes and pilots to the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Hummer ("Lobster") was what they called their effort to insert German agents into England. And Operation Barbarossa, which was Frederick I's ferocious-sounding last name, was what the Axis Powers named their plan to invade Russia in 1941 with 4.5 million troops.

The British had their own clever names. Among themDracula, for their amphibious invasion of Rangoon, Burma; Matador, their 1945 occupation of Ramree island in Malaya; and Screwdriver for the occupation they led against a Japanese headquarters at Sitaparokia Rock in Indian Ocean waters.

Closer to literally today, we and the French already have names for our military operations in Libya.

France, which claims to be leading these efforts, calls its contribution Operation Harmattan. I needed to look that one up.

According to Wikipedia the Harmattan is a dry and dusty West African wind that blows south from the Sahara into the Gulf of Guinea between the end of November and the middle of March. It can cause temperatures to fall to almost freezing and on its passage over the desert it picks up fine dust particles. Usually so many that they severely limit visibility and block the sun for days.

I get the north-south part of this (France is doing its Libyan thing from the north)--though I hope neither the French nor we lose metaphoric visibility--and it is also good to know that the actual Harmattan tends to end by the middle of March. It is now March 22nd so perhaps Barack Obama will be true to his word and thus what we have joined the French and others to do will end soon.

The U.S. name for its involvement is quite literary, not entirely surprising since Obama is a reader. We are engaged in Operation Odyssey Dawn.

After Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic, helped defeat the Trojans during the war of that name, with his men, he left Troy to return home and to his long-suffering wife. But the end of the war turned out to be just the beginning of another chapter in his long saga. It will be another ten more years before Odysseus sets foot in Ithaca.

He started out from Troy with twelve ships, but after he sacked the Ciconian city of Ismarus, winds drove him south to the coast of, yes, Libya. To determine where they were, three scouts were sent to reconnoiter, but they did not return and so Odysseus set after them. When he discovered their location and circumstances, he . . . let us, from Homer, hear Odysseus' words:

[My scouts] went about among the Lotus-Eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-Eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches.

And recall, after this narcotic idle in what is now Libya, it took Odysseus many more years to complete his journey. In all, about as long as we have been in Afghanistan and Iraq. Not that I doubt my president who is, about Libya, talking days of involvement, not months or years. But we should keep an eye on things.

Very often, what's in a name is quite a lot.