Going back a decade

So you run into this guy who, ten years ago back in college, dated this girl Susan from your dorm.

He strikes you as much more interesting now than he was back then, so you ask him, "What's up with you and Susan?"

He says, "My relationship goes back a decade."

This is not what you wanted to hear. It means he and Susan are clearly still involved. Probably deeply involved.

In normal American English, that's what the phrase "going back a decade" means: something that is ongoing. If his relationship were not ongoing, he would have said something like "Susan? We dated a few times, but that was 10 years ago."

So you move along, consoled by the memory that Susan's ankles had gotten kind of thick by senior year and she couldn't possibly still be as skinny as she was in college.

= = = = = = = = = = = =

It is possible for the phrase "going back a decade" to refer to something that is not ongoing. This requires an unnatural syntax and the careful placement of strategic commas — but it is possible. Consider:

George W. Bush, going back decades, has a reputation for drinking too much.

The sentence seems at first glance to be unfair — implying that the president's reputation during his rowdy youth is enduring and ongoing. But note that the phrase "going back decades" isn't necessarily modifying only the subject of the sentence — it could be read as modifying the entire sentence. Thus while the statement "George Bush … has a reputation" may not be true now, it is (i.e., was) true if we go back a few decades and, having traveled back in time as it were, speak of the past as the present.

As I said, this is not the most natural or the most obvious reading of such a sentence. But it is possible.

Thus if you are careful to use this phrase only in this latter, convoluted and ambiguous way, you can imply that all sorts of things have been going on for years and years even though this implication is blatantly untrue. And if someone calls you on it, you can claim that your statements did not necessarily refer to something ongoing.

Try it, it's fun:

For a long time, going back decades, Arnold Schwarzenegger was professing his love to a woman who was not his wife.

That sentence seems to suggest that the current governor of California has been having a longterm affair. But I could also claim that it merely refers to Arnold's courting of Maria Shriver before they were married — and thus avoid getting sued and/or beaten up.

= = = = = = = = = = = =

This is not, unfortunately, an entirely frivolous discussion of the ambiguities of language.

This ambiguous, misleading use of the phrase "going back decades" has been a major semantic tool that the Bush administration has used to create public support for trying to avenge the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by retaliating against a country that had nothing to do with them.

President Bush and his various proxies assured the American people that Saddam Hussein must still have weapons of mass destruction because he used them against his own people "going back decades." This allowed Bush to pretend that the war waged by his father in 1991 and the decade of sanctions, inspections, enforced disarmament and weekly bombing that followed had no impact on Saddam's military capability.

More recently, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have latched onto former CIA Director George Tenet's use of the phrase in defense of their claim that Saddam Hussein has had a longstanding partnership with al-Qaida.

As The Washington Post's Pincus and Milbank report, Tenet wrote a letter in 2002 in which he referred to "senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida going back a decade."

The staff of the Sept. 11 commission explains what "going back a decade" means in this instance:

The report of the commission's staff, based on its access to all relevant classified information, said that there had been contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida but no cooperation. In yesterday's hearing of the panel … a senior FBI official and a senior CIA analyst concurred with the finding.

The staff report said that bin Laden "explored possible cooperation with Iraq" while in Sudan through 1996, but that "Iraq apparently never responded" to a bin Laden request for help in 1994. The commission cited reports of contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida after bin Laden went to Afghanistan in 1996, adding, "but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al-Qaida and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States."

Slate's Fred Kaplan further parses the president's parsing — finding Bush's carefully chosen language implying an Iraq/al-Qaida link to be deliberately misleading, but not, strictly speaking, a lie. Cheney, however, hasn't chosen his words quite as carefully. Here's Kaplan's kicker:

The president is just sneaky. The vice president lies.