Battlebabble -- Selling War in America
By Colman McCarthy
When not whining about media carpers for their unrosy war stories about Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld gripes about insurgent nasties who won’t fight fair. After asking a Senate committee on March 9 to dole out still billions more for the war, he said: “The enemy cannot win a single conventional battle. So they challenge us through non-traditional, asymmetric means, using terror as their weapon of choice.”
On July 2, 2003, Rumsfeld’s commander-in-chief had the opposite view of the Iraqi bad guys: “Bring ‘em on!,” said W. “We’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.”
A word has been coined to describe this dissonance: “battlebabble.” The coiner is Thomas Lee, a science professor for 35 years at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire until his retirement three years ago and as canny an exposer of military bunk and bull as can be found once you realize it won’t be much found in the corporate media.
I met Professor Lee during a recent visit to New Hampshire. Common Courage Press had just published his masterpiece of research and commentary, “Battlebabble: Selling War in America.” Lee calls it “a dictionary of deception.” Alphabetically from “aerial ordnance” and “assertive disarmament” to “yellowcake,” he fills 346 pages with 204 entries on the rhetoric of war and the perversions of truth that becomes “a battlebabble used to soften and hide the grim realities of the new American colonialism in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.”
Like Ambrose Bierce and his classic “Devil’s Dictionary,” Lee writes with bite. In the “A” section he defines the asymmetric warfare that irks Rumsfeld as the kind “that often takes place when the enemy, faced with a vastly superior force, refuses to act like real men and stand still so that they can be killed.” Rumsfeld doesn’t get it. Terror isn’t a weapon, it’s a tactic. Roadside bombs are the weapons, against which the world’s most powerful military is all but helpless.
Lee examines the prettified language that the Pentagon concocts to camouflage the gore of its invasions. In 1991, it was “Operation Desert Shield,” “a title which suggested that this was a ‘defensive mission’ using a shield against the bloody sword of Iraq’s aggression.” This morphed into “Operation Desert Storm” which “meshed neatly with the initial aerial bombardment (‘Operation Instant Thunder’), the ground attack (‘Operation Desert Saber’), the later redeployment (‘Operation Desert Farewell’) and the donation of leftover military food supplies to poor U.S. citizens (‘Operation Desert Share’).” Then came Afghanistan and “Operation Enduring Freedom.”
Perfuming the stench of war with these operation scents is traced by Lee to World War I when “the Germans tried to inspire their battle-weary soldiers with fanciful names for offenses such as ‘Mars,’ “’Achilles,’ and ‘Archangel.’” Naming rights is best not left to realists. During the Korean War, Gen, Matthew Ridgeway came up with “Operation Killer.” He was overruled by the Army Chief of Staff who objected that “the word ‘killer’
struck an unpleasant note as far as public relations was concerned.” Lyndon Johnson scotched “Operation Masher” during the Vietnam War, saying that ‘it did not reflect pacification emphasis.”
Lee reports that Pentagon linguists are now on top of things: names must not “express a degree of bellicosity inconsistent with traditional American ideals or current foreign policy.”
Military babblespeak should not be confused with doublespeak. As defined by Rutgers University Professor William Lutz, doublespeak is a phrase designed to befog. In Lutz’s “Quarterly Review of Doublespeak,” bombing isn’t bombing, it’s “air support.” Peace is “permanent pre-hostility.” The U.S. invasion of Panama was “a pre-dawn vertical insertion.” A six-sided steel nut is “a hexaform rotatable surface compression unit.”
It is telling that it fell to a retired science professor from a remote north country village--Goffstown, N.H.--to assemble the facts that from the start the Iraq war demanded deception. “Battlebabble” didn’t come from the hands of war correspondents, nor from pliant reporters who take dictation at White House and Pentagon press briefings, and assuredly not from those in the national media who have yet to apologize for their suck-up roles in supporting Bush’s war. Instead of giving the public the low down, they chose to lie down.
For now, Professor Tom Lee stands in the front ranks of truth-tellers—in stark contrast to those in the back ranks of truth avoiders.