A
Dictionary of Euphemisms for Imperial Decline
By William
J. Astore
The dishonesty of words illustrates the dishonesty of
America’s wars. Since 9/11, can there be any doubt that the public has
become numb to the euphemisms
that regularly accompany U.S. troops, drones, and CIA operatives into
Washington’s imperial conflicts across the Greater Middle East
and Africa? Such euphemisms are meant to take the sting out of
America’s wars back home. Many of these words and phrases
are already so well
known and well worn that no one thinks twice about them anymore.
Here are just a few: collateral
damage for killed and wounded civilians (a term used
regularly since the First Gulf War of 1990-1991).
Enhanced
interrogation techniques for torture, a term adopted with
vigor by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of their
administration (“techniques” that were actually
demonstrated
in the White House). Extraordinary
rendition for CIA kidnappings of terror suspects off global
streets or from remote badlands, often followed by the employment of
enhanced interrogation techniques at U.S. black
sites or other foreign
hellholes. Detainees for prisoners and detention
camp for prison (or, in some cases, more honestly, concentration
camp), used to describe Guantánamo (Gitmo), among other places
established offshore of American justice. Targeted
killings for presidentially
ordered drone assassinations. Boots
on the ground for yet another deployment of “our”
troops (and not just their boots) in harm’s way. Even the Bush
administration’s Global War on Terror, its label for an attempt
to transform the Greater Middle East into a Pax Americana,
would be redubbed in the Obama years overseas
contingency operations (before any attempt at labeling was
dropped for a no-name war pursued across major swathes of the
planet).
As euphemisms were deployed to cloak that war’s
bitter and brutal realities, over-the-top honorifics were assigned to
America’s embattled role in the world. Exceptional,
indispensable,
and greatest have been the three words most commonly used by
presidents, politicians, and the gung
ho to describe this country. Once upon a time, if Americans
thought this way, they felt no need to have their presidents and
presidential candidates actually say so -- such was the confidence of
the golden age of American power. So consider the constant
redeployment of these terms a small measure of America’s
growing defensiveness about itself, its sense of doubt and decline
rather than strength and confidence.
To what end this concerted assault on the words we use?
In George Orwell’s classic
1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” he
noted that his era’s equivalents for “collateral damage”
were “needed if one wants to name things without calling up
mental pictures of them.” Obviously, not much has changed in
the intervening seven decades. And this is, as Orwell intuited,
a dangerous way to go. Cloaking violent, even murderous actions
in anodyne language might help a few doubting functionaries sleep
easier at night, but it should make the rest of us profoundly uneasy.
The more American leaders and officials -- and the media
that quotes them endlessly -- employ such euphemisms to cloak harsh
realities, the more they ensure that such harshness will endure;
indeed, that it is likely to grow harsher and more pernicious as we
continue to settle into a world of euphemistic thinking.
The Emptiness of Acronyms
In the future, some linguist or lexicographer will
doubtless compile a
dictionary of perpetual war and perhaps (since they may be
linked) imperial decline, focusing on the grim processes and versions
of failure language can cloak. It would undoubtedly explore how
certain words and rhetorical
devices were used in twenty-first-century America to obscure the
heavy burdens that war placed on the country, even as they
facilitated its continuing failed
conflicts. It would obviously include classic examples like
surge, used in both Iraq and Afghanistan to obscure the way
our government rushed extra troops into a battle zone in a moment of
failure only ensuring the extension of that failure, and the
now-classic phrase shock and awe that obscured the reality
of a massive air strike on Baghdad that resulted in the deaths of
dozens
of civilians (“collateral damage”), but not the
“decapitation” of a hated regime.
Don’t think, however, that the language of
twenty-first-century American war was only meant to lull the public.
Less familiar words and terms continue to be used within the military
not to clarify tasks at hand but to obscure certain obvious realities
even from those sanctioned to deal with them. Take asymmetrical
warfare, the gray zone, and VUCA. Unless
you spend time in Department of Defense and military circles, you
probably haven’t heard of these.
Asymmetrical
warfare suggests that the enemy fights unfairly and in a
thoroughly cowardly fashion, regularly lurking behind and mixing with
civilians (“hostages”), because that enemy doesn’t
have the moxie to don uniforms and stand toe-to-toe in a “kinetic”
smack-down with U.S. troops. As a result, of course, the U.S.
must be prepared for underhanded tactics and devious weaponry,
including ambushes and IEDs (improvised explosive devices, or
roadside bombs), as well as a range of other “unconventional”
tactics now all too familiar in a world plagued by violent attacks
against “soft” targets (aka civilians). It must
also be prepared to engage an enemy mixed in with a civilian
population and so brace itself for the inevitable collateral damage
that is now so much the
essence of American war.
That
groups like the Islamic State (ISIS) would choose to fight
“asymmetrically” should hardly come as a surprise to
anyone who’s ever been confronted by a much bigger and better
armed kid in a schoolyard. Misdirection, a sucker punch, a
slingshot, even running away to fight another day are “asymmetrical”
approaches that are sensible indeed for any outgunned and overmatched
opponent. The term is a truism, nothing more, when it comes to
the realities of our world. It is, however, a useful way of framing
matters for those in the Pentagon and the military who don’t
want to think seriously about the grim course of action, focused
significantly on civilian populations, they are pursuing, which often
instills anger and the urge for revenge in such populations and so,
in the end, runs at cross purposes to stated U.S. aims.
The “gray
zone” is a fuzzy term used in military circles to describe
the perplexing nature of lower-level conflicts, often involving
non-state actors, that don’t qualify as full-fledged wars.
These are often fought using non-traditional weapons and tactics
ranging from cyber attacks to the propagandizing of potential terror
recruits via social media. This “zone” is unnerving to
Pentagon types in part because the vast majority of the Pentagon’s
funding goes to conventional weaponry that’s as subtle as a
sledgehammer: big-ticket items like aircraft carriers, nuclear
submarines, main battle tanks, strategic bombers, and wildly
expensive multi-role aircraft such as the F-35 (now estimated to
cost roughly $1.4 trillion through its lifecycle). Much of
this weaponry is “too big to fail” in the funding wars in
Washington, but regularly fails in the field precisely because it’s
too big to be used effectively against the latest crop of evasive
enemies. Hence, that irresolvable gray zone which plagues
America’s defense planners and operatives.
The question the gray zone both raises and obscures is:
Why has the U.S. done so poorly when, by its own definition, it
remains the biggest, baddest superpower around, the one that
outspends its non-state enemies by a factor so large it can’t
even be calculated? Keep in mind, for instance, that the 9/11
attacks on American soil were estimated to have cost Osama bin Laden
at most a half-million
dollars. Multiply that by 400 and you can buy one “made in
America” F-35 jet fighter.
If the gray zone offers little help clarifying America’s
military dilemmas, what about VUCA?
It’s an acronym for volatile, uncertain, complex, and
ambiguous, which is meant to describe our post-9/11 world. Of
course, there’s nothing like an acronym to take the sting out
of any world. But as an historian who has read a lot of history
books, let me confess that, to the best of my knowledge, the world
has always been, is now, and will always be VUCA.
For any future historian of the Pentagon’s
language, let me sum things up this way: instead of honest talk about
war in all its ugliness and uncertainty, military professionals of
our era have tended to substitute buzz words, catchphrases, and
acronyms. It’s a way of muddying the water. It
allows the world of war to tumble on without serious challenge, which
is why it’s been so useful in these years to speak of, say,
COIN (Counterinsurgency) or 4GW (Fourth-Generation
Warfare).
Much like its most recent enthusiast, General David
Petraeus, COIN has once again lost favor in the military, but
Fourth-Generation Warfare is still riding high and sounds so
refreshingly forward-looking, not like the stale Vietnam-era wine in
a post-9/11 bottle that it is. In reality, it’s another
iteration of insurgency
and COIN mixed and matched with Chinese Communist leader Mao
Zedong’s people's war. To prevail in places like
Afghanistan, so 4GW thinkers suggest, one needs to win hearts and
minds -- yes, that classic phrase of defeat in Vietnam -- while
securing and protecting (a definite COINage) the people against
insurgents and terrorists. In other words, we’re talking
about an acronym that immediately begins to congeal if you use older
words to describe it like “pacification” and
“nation-building.” The latest 4GW jargon may not help win
wars, but it does sometimes win healthy research grants from the
government.
The fact is that trendy acronyms and snappy buzz words
have a way of limiting genuine thinking on war. If America is
to win (or, far better, avoid) future wars, its war professionals
need to look more honestly at that phenomenon in all of its
dimensions. So, too, do the American people, for it’s in
their name that such wars are allegedly
waged.
The Truth About “Progress” in
America’s Wars
These days, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter often
resorts to cancer
imagery when describing the Islamic state. "Parent
tumor" is an image he especially favors -- that is,
terrorism as a cancer that America’s militarized surgeons need
to attack and destroy before it metastasizes and has “children.”
(Think of the ISIS franchises in Libya, where the organization has
recently
doubled in size, Afghanistan,
and Yemen.)
Hence the proliferation of “surgical strikes” by drones
and similarly “surgical” Special Ops raids, both of which
you could think of as America’s equivalent of white blood cells
in its war on the cancer of terrorism.
But is terrorism really a civilizational cancer that can
be “cured” via the most aggressive “kinetic”
treatments? Can the U.S. render the world cancer-free?
For that’s what Carter’s language implies. And how
does one measure “progress” in a “war” on the
cancer of ISIS? Indeed, from an outsider’s perspective,
the proliferation of U.S. military bases around the world (there are
now roughly 800),
as well as of drone strikes, Special Ops raids, and massive weapons
exports might have a cancerous look to them. In other
words, what constitutes a “cancer” depends on one’s
perspective -- and perhaps one’s definition of world “health,”
too.
The very notion of progress in America’s recent
wars is one that a colleague, Michael Murry, recently critiqued.
A U.S. Navy Vietnam War Veteran, he wrote me that, for his favorite
military euphemism, “I have to go with ‘progress’
as incessantly chanted by the American military brass in Iraq and
Afghanistan…
“We go on
hearing about 14 years of ‘progress’ which, to hear our
generals tell it, would vanish in an instant should the United States
withdraw its forces and let the locals and their neighbors sort
things out. Since when do ‘fragile gains’ equate to
‘progress’? Who in their right mind would invest rivers
of blood and trillions of dollars in ‘fragility’? Now
that I think of it, we also have the euphemistic expression of
‘drawdown’ substituting for ‘withdrawal’
which in turn substitutes for ‘retreat.’ The U.S.
military and the civilian government it has browbeaten into hapless
acquiescence simply cannot face the truth of their monumental
failures and so must continually bastardize our language in a losing
-- almost comical -- attempt to stay one linguistic step ahead of the
truth.”
Progress, as Murry notes, basically means nothing when
such “gains,” in the words of David Petraeus during the
surge months in Iraq in 2007, are both “fragile”
and “reversible.” Indeed, Petraeus repeated the same
two words in
2011 to describe similar U.S. “progress” in
Afghanistan, and today it couldn’t be clearer just how much
“progress” was truly
made there. Isn’t it time for government officials to
stop banging the drums of war talk in favor of “progress”
when none exists?
Think, for instance, of the American-trained (and now
re-trained) Iraqi security forces. Each year U.S. officials swear
that the Iraqi military is getting ever closer to combat readiness,
but much like one
of Zeno’s paradoxes, the half-steps that military takes
under American tutelage never seem to get it into fighting shape.
Progress, eternally touted, seems always to lead to regress,
eternally explained away, as that army regularly underperforms
or its units simply collapse, often abandoning their
American-supplied weaponry to the enemy. Here we are, 12 years
after the U.S. began training the Iraqi military and once again it
seems to be cratering,
this time while supposedly on
the road to retaking Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul,
from its Islamic State occupiers. Progress, anyone?
In short, the dishonesty of the words the U.S. military
regularly wields illustrates the dishonesty of its never-ending wars.
After so many years of failure and frustration, of wars that aren’t
won and terrorist movements that only seem to spread as its leaders
are knocked
off, isn’t it past time for Americans to ditch phrases like
“collateral damage,” “enemy noncombatant,”
“no-fly zone” (or even worse, “safe zone”),
and “surgical strike” and adopt a language, however grim,
that accurately describes the military realities of this era?
Words matter, especially words about war. So as a
change of pace, instead of the usual bloodless euphemisms and vapid
acronyms, perhaps the U.S. government could tell the shocking and
awful truth to the American people in plain language about the
realities and dangers
of never-ending war.
William Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF)
and professor of history. He blogs at Bracing
Views.
Thanks to TomDispatch.com, where this article originally appeared.
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