The Iraq War's Go-To Cliché

Godwin's law posits that as an Internet discussion grows longer (and more heated), it becomes more and more likely that someone or something will be compared to Hitler. As in, "Oh yeah, well that's just what Hitler did in Nazi Germany!" Once a conversation has Gone to Hitler, it has pretty much run its course.

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?"