As Gaddafi's forces were being destroyed in battles that pitted British
weapons against other British weapons, more of the same were being sold
to authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.
One of my favourite cartoons was published by the New Yorker magazine way back in the early 1980s.
It shows some soignee types consorting - their diaphanous gowns
suggest that they're divine, their cocktail glasses that they're merely
sophisticated. The location for this party is one of those chimerical
realms that only the sparse pen-and-wash of a first-class cartoonist can
summon up - it could be Mount Olympus, but it could just as easily be
the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Anyway, a svelte, gowned female is introducing another more robust,
gowned male to a third partygoer, while announcing, "I believe you know
Mars, god of defence."
Euphemism - along with its kissing cousin, jargon - is integral to
modern warfare - indeed, it's difficult to imagine a conflict in recent
years that hasn't spawned its own little lexicon of obfuscation designed
to sanitise the miserable and sickening business of uniformed young men
eviscerating one another with high explosive, while drawing a veil over
the so-called "collateral damage" wreaked upon civilians.
Recent wars have been prosecuted by means of "surges", "operations",
and "tactical strikes" - terms that imply the life-saving activities of
doctors rather than the life-discarding ones of warriors.
It's probably no coincidence that our own War Office was renamed the
Ministry of Defence in 1964, the year when the Tonkin "incident" led to
the "escalation" of the "conflict" in Vietnam. True, the British
government took no direct part in the "winning of hearts and minds" or
the "deployment of Agent Orange", but we did our bit by carpet-bombing
our own sensibilities with such highly-toxic euphemisms.
Almost a half-century later we're still at it, and while the vanguard
is formed by that bewildering phenomenon, "humanitarian intervention",
it is in the vital area of "logistical support" that we Britons have
proved ourselves most linguistically adept.
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