Unspeak

by Steven Poole

  In the same way, the service (the military) as a whole may be recast as a service industry. Missiles and aircraft are ‘force packages’55 and ‘delivery systems’, as though the US Air Force were just a branch of FedEx. Weapons are ‘assets’,56 and the leaflets, radio shows, and other materials produced by US Psychological Operations teams are called ‘products’: ‘It’s not like selling Coke,’ one PsyOps officer told writer Jon Ronson. ‘Sometimes you’re trying to sell someone something that you know they might not want in their hearts.’57 In other words, it’s not like selling Coke, but it is ‘selling’ something. The verb ‘to service’ is also, creatively, used as a euphemism for ‘to blow up’. As one artillery captain explained in the first Gulf War: ‘I prefer not to say we are killing other people. I prefer to say we are servicing the target.’58 As well as its disguising of war as a merely commercial activity, to call the launching of explosives ‘servicing the target’ has a further, remarkable implication. Since the barbarous twentieth-century business sense of ‘servicing’ to mean providing a service59 denotes the supply of something that was explicitly requested, the artilleryman’s language implied that those people who were the target were actually asking for it. He was simply fulfilling their wishes.

  Servicing targets, delivering force, providing a service: war was, then, business as usual. War might once have been, as Clausewitz famously remarked, ‘the continuation of politics by other means’. Now it was the continuation of commerce by other means. Wars as a whole, indeed, are often discussed in overarching economic terms, balancing victory against ‘cost’ or ‘price’. This is how General Westmoreland remembered the Vietnam war:

  The objective in Washington was to raise the cost of the war from the standpoint of the enemy, to the point that he would come to some negotiated settlement. The attitude of the enemy was not comparable to what our attitude would have been under the circumstances. He was ready, willing and able to pay a far greater price than I would say we Caucasians would.60

  Westmoreland’s ‘we Caucasians’ may be fruitfully compared to Muhammad Ali’s description of Vietnam as ‘a white man’s war’.61 But US soldiers on the ground in Vietnam did not buy this notion of human lives as summable in terms of a ‘cost’ or ‘price’ that, as long as it was lower than some critical number, would be worth paying. Their view that human life was precious for altogether different reasons was evident in their coining of a modern slang term for killed: ‘wasted’.62

  Collateral

  The weapons that are used to service targets, or as the surgical instruments in operations, are also given names that hide their real functions, since those are considered unspeakable. In Vietnam, a ‘beehive round’ did not contain tasty honey but was ‘an explosive artillery shell which delivered thousands of small projectiles, “like nails with fins,” instead of shrapnel.’63 The Daisy Cutters dropped in the first Gulf War and Afghanistan were not tools of horticultural tidying-up but unguided 15,000-pound bombs that obliterated everything in a 250-foot radius, and which ‘were dropped as much for their psychological effect as for their destructive power’.64 An intercontinental ballistic missile developed by the US in the 1980s, which carried ten separate re-entry vehicles, each armed with a nuclear warhead representing the destructive power of twenty-five Hiroshimas, was dubbed by Ronald Reagan the Peacekeeper.65 The name stuck.

  Our weapons are surgical, or, as was first announced in the Vietnam War and later repeated enthusiastically during the first Gulf War, ‘smart’. Smart weapons do not hold conversations about the films of Ingmar Bergman or the novels of Nabokov; they merely go, allegedly, where they are supposed to go. Between 7 and 10 per cent of them in fact miss,66 sometimes by a long way: cruise missiles fired at Iraq during the 2003 war landed in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.67 Even such ‘smart weapons’, however, constituted only a minority of the weapons used by US and UK forces in 1991, and about half those used during the 2003 war. Among those weapons we might consider ‘dumb’ are what are euphemised as ‘cluster bombs’, which do not drop in a tight cluster of limited radius but are designed expressly to spray their cargo of sub-munitions, or cutely named ‘bomblets’, over a wide distance. One such bomb regularly dropped on Iraq even before the 2003 war, as part of the enforcement of no-fly zones, was known as the Joint Stand-Off Weapon, which contained ‘145 anti-armor and anti-personnel incendiary bomblets’ that scattered over an area the size of a football field. On average 5 per cent of them did not immediately detonate, and lay in wait as mines for years afterwards, incapable of ‘smartly’ distinguishing between soldier and civilian.68 In mid-2003, after the end of ‘major combat operations’ in Iraq, it was estimated that up to ten thousand such unex-ploded ‘bomblets’ dropped by US and UK aircraft littered the country.69

  Meanwhile, in the same war the US used an upgraded version of napalm that was made from kerosene rather than petrol. Cunningly it subsequently denied any use of ‘napalm’, because the new incendiaries were instead called ‘Mark 77 firebombs’. The troops, though, undermined this cynical Unspeak strategy by continuing to call it napalm. ‘“We napalmed both those [bridge] approaches,” said Colonel James Alles, commander of Marine Air Group 11. “Unfortunately there were people there … you could see them in the [cockpit] video. They were Iraqi soldiers. It’s no great way to die. The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect.”’70

  Unrepresentative of western tactics though they remained, the development of modern laser-guided missiles and other ‘smart weapons’ in the 1990s had been hailed as a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’. Why? Because with smart weapons, ‘only the bad guys get hurt’.71 In other words, their well-publicised existence made war less controversial, because they allegedly reduced ‘collateral damage’.

  The phrase ‘collateral damage’ is first recorded in the 1975 ‘SALT lexicon’ issued by the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency to accompany the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the US and the USSR. It was defined as The damage to surrounding human and non-human resources, either military or non-military, as the result of action or strikes directed specifically against enemy forces or military facilities.’72 (We are by now familiar with what is meant by ‘human and non-human resources’.) Curiously, lexicographer William Safire goes on to claim that ‘This term was turned into a euphemism during the Gulf War of 1991.’73 But from birth it was already a horrifying phrase in its euphemistic efficiency.

  Damage is what occurs to objects: buildings or vehicles are ‘damaged’; we do not usually say that a human being can be ‘damaged’, except metaphorically, to indicate an emotional problem. To call the killing of human beings ‘damage’ is to deny their personhood, their existence as individuals, and their crucial difference from inanimate matter. Meanwhile, ‘collateral’ makes us think of something happening on the sidelines, in the wings: as it were, offstage. The phrase thus graphically performs its own function: it evokes an image of hiddenness, exactly as its purpose is to hide the reality of what it refers to. It’s very clever. It’s also hideous. In its German form, Kollateralschaden, it was voted ‘ugliest word of the year’ in 1999.74 yet, according to the authors of the 9/11 Commission Report, one reason why we should despise Al Qaeda was because: ‘It makes no distinction between military and civilian targets. Collateral damage is not in its lexicon.’75 The implication seems to be that we should be proud of our moral sensitivity and linguistic creativity in having invented the phrase ‘collateral damage’ itself. One might not consider this cause for too much self-congratulation.

  It is worth noting that the 1975 SALT lexicon also defines the concept of ‘unacceptable damage’, the degree of destruction possible by a retaliatory enemy strike that is considered sufficient to deter a first strike. So whatever is described as ‘collateral damage’ is by implication acceptable. It might yet be bad for publicity, however. General Tommy Franks’s remark that ‘We don’t do body counts’76 was widely quoted as evidence for a callous attitude towards civilian casualties; in fact h
e was making a different point, that progress in the Afghanistan war should not be measured by the numbers of enemy killed. And yet the number of civilians killed in the Iraq war was an embarrassing subject studiously avoided by pro-invasion commentators and politicians, except to say blandly that it was as low as possible. ‘The war […] was completed with dispatch and with minimal collateral damage and with minimal loss of life,’ said Donald Rumsfeld in 2005.77 What exact quantity was hidden behind the usefully vague term ‘minimal’? No official was saying. The Pentagon allegedly kept data but did not reveal it to the public.78 At the time of writing, the conservative minimum estimate of civilian deaths caused by the invasion of Iraq, according to the Iraq Body Count organisation, was 27,295.79 Collateral. Acceptable.

  Even thus euphemised and officially uncounted, collateral damage is still an inconvenient phenomenon to commanders. In early March 2003, Franks had presented George W. Bush with a list of ‘24 high-collateral-damage targets that could result in the killing of 30 or more civilians if struck’. Bush’s response was: ‘I’m not picking targets.’80 Relating this scene, Bob Woodward pointed out: ‘In the Vietnam War, President Johnson had spent hours reviewing and approving targets.’ But the prospect of civilian deaths apparently made President Bush squeamish. Having ordered a war, he did not want to dirty his hands with the ugly details.

  Luckily, there is an excellent way to minimise accountability for ‘collateral damage’. It was used extensively in the Vietnam War, when, according to US Marine Philip Caputo, ‘We were told … “Well, if it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC.”’81 After US forces bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan, Donald Rumsfeld said: ‘Let’s not call them innocents. We don’t know quite what they were.’82 In the meantime, US Special Forces soldier Dave Diaz told a reporter how, in Afghanistan, they played ‘this terminology game’. In order to justify attack, a ‘mud hut’ would be referred to as a ‘military compound’ or a ‘built-up area’. If women and children were observed among a party of Taliban that forces wanted to attack, Diaz’s ‘guidance’ would be that ‘they are combatants’.83 You can see the pattern. Rather than wring one’s hands about the deaths of civilians, why not just change what you call them? Say they are not civilians after all but Viet Cong or ‘combatants’. Remember: ‘only the bad guys get hurt’. So anyone who gets hurt must be a bad guy. Then the whole problem of ‘collateral damage’ may be safely swept under the carpet.

  Mass destruction

  If we euphemise our own weapons and killings of civilians, we also dysphemise (if I may use an appropriately hideous word) the weapons of the enemy, giving them names to make them sound as horrible as possible. The notorious Scud missile of Saddam Hussein was actually christened ‘Scud’ by the West. The weapon was first developed by the Soviets in the 1960s, under the less evocative designation R-11; Nato referred to it as the ‘SS-lb Scud-A’.84 The Iraqi military later heavily modified the design, but it was useful to keep the name Scud so as to make it sound maximally brutal and disgusting.

  Ballistic missiles such as the Scud are considered ‘weapons of mass destruction’, a term that, as used in the early years of the twenty-first century, carried an impressive payload of special pleading and disinformation. Saddam Hussein’s fictional stockpiles of WMD were settled on as the excuse for war ‘for bureaucratic reasons’, as US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz explained afterwards.85 Condoleezza Rice’s catchy slogan, ‘We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud’,86 dropped a heavy hint that nuclear armageddon would be the price of inaction, and much speculation surrounded chemical and biological weapons. Wrapping it all up in the mantra WMD enabled everyone to forget about the details and simply trust that the Iraqi leader had amassed the most egregious arsenal known to man. The notorious ‘dossier’ released by the British government in September 2002 had its title altered, at the last minute, from ‘Saddam’s Programme for Weapons of Mass Destruction’ to ‘Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction’,87 thus changing the nature of what was described from one man’s desire to a country’s imminent threat.

  The cold, bureaucratic terminology of the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ only served to make it more frightening, as it evoked the rational calculations of kill-ratios in moodily lit government departments. Such weapons, we were enjoined to believe, were worse in a qualitative, not merely quantitative way from other weapons (but no one referred to weapons of local destruction or weapons of small destruction). One could not imagine even the most robust defender of the use of force saying, in an adaptation of the US gun-enthusiast’s mantra: ‘Weapons of mass destruction don’t kill people; people kill people.’

  The apocalyptic tone of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was matched by a concomitant vagueness. How much destruction was to be considered ‘mass destruction’? No one was saying. The kinds of chemical and biological weapons so far employed in human warfare do not even begin to approach the devastation of which a single Peacekeeper is capable. They are much less destructive, too, than many other kinds of weapons, such as the US’s MOAB, for Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or, in the Air Force’s affectionate nickname, Mother Of All Bombs (a sarcastic rejoinder to Saddam Hussein’s promise of ‘the mother of all battles’ in 1991). Unveiled in March 2003 as the successor to the Daisy Cutter, the MOAB contained 18,700 pounds of high explosive,88 and did not simply push air around; it was able to kill all people within a 1.7-mile radius and break windows up to five miles away, and created ‘a fear-inspiring mushroom cloud’ 10,000 feet high.89 Saddam Hussein’s chemical-weapon attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja was an atrocity, but, as Christopher Hitchens observed: ‘A sustained day of carpet-bombing with “conventional” weapons would have been more lethal, as well as more annihilating.’90 (Of course ‘carpet-bombing’ is a euphemism as well: incendiary bombing means the dropping of incendiaries, nuclear bombing means the dropping of nukes, but carpet bombing does not mean the dropping of textile floor-coverings.) Aum Shinrikyo’s nerve-gas attack on the highly crowded Tokyo subway in 1995, meanwhile, managed to kill only twelve people. The phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ conflates very different levels of threat and confuses more than it illuminates, even when not cynically used as a propaganda tool. In July 2005, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace announced that the newest volume in its twenty-one-year-old series on proliferation would abandon the phrase completely, because it ‘confuses officials, befuddles the public, and justifies policies that more precise language and more accurate assessments would not support’,91 in particular obscuring the fact that the gravest danger to the planet was still posed specifically by nuclear weapons.

  It is commonly stated that the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ originated in détente negotiations over the thermonuclear arsenals of the US and the USSR.92 The phrase was certainly apt in the context of nuclear arms-race concepts such as ‘overkill’ (how many multiples of the entire population of Earth could be killed if all the nukes were launched) and ‘mutually assured destruction’, enshrined in history’s most apt acronym, MAD. But ‘weapons of mass destruction’ had actually been coined much earlier, to describe the new, mechanised warfighting vehicles and matériel being developed in the 1930s. ‘Who can think without horror,’ wrote a Times editorialist in 1937, ‘of what another widespread war would mean, waged as it would be with all the new weapons of mass destruction?’93 In other words, what are now our ordinary weapons were themselves once feared as WMD. They have been domesticised in our consciousness with the euphemism ‘conventional weapons’: to fight with them is more socially acceptable because everybody does it: it’s conventional. Usefully, a secondary sense of ‘conventional’, to mean explicitly agreed by convention, is also implied, even though it is argued by many that the use of cluster bombs violates the 1997 UN Convention against landmines.94 In modern business parlance, however, conventional is boring and unexciting; the virtuous thing is to be unconventional (‘think outside the box’). This revolution in commercial affairs, it
seemed, had not yet filtered through to weapons-talk. To be unconventional in war is defined as not playing by our rules, which are honest and just: to be unconventional, essentially, is cheating.

  In this way there remained a feeling that the chemical and biological weapons lumped together under weapons of mass destruction were incomparably nasty, that fighting with disease or gas, as opposed to rocket-propelled radioactive waste or bombs that spawn hundreds of bomblets, was somehow more underhand. It was just not cricket. Like napalm, it had a powerful ‘psychological effect’. It played, perhaps, on age-old fears of the invisible enemy, of silent contagion. It also played on fears of the mad scientist, fears that John Ashcroft was eager to encourage in the following extraordinary statement after the war had been declared won: