The Fog of War Talk

By John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, AlterNet. Posted July 28, 2003.

Editor's Note: This is an edited excerpt from the newly released book "Weapons of Mass Deception: the Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq", by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber.

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible," George Orwell wrote in 1946. "Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness."

Orwell was a shrewd observer of the relationship between politics and language. He did not actually invent the term "doublespeak," but he popularized the concept, which is an amalgam of two terms that he coined in "1984," his greatest novel. Orwell used the term "doublethink" to describe a contradictory way of thinking that lets people say things that mean the opposite of what they actually think. He used the term "newspeak" to describe words "deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them."

Hail the Noble Warriors

Doublespeak has accompanied war for thousands of years. English professor William Lutz has found examples as early as Julius Caesar, who described his brutal and bloody conquest of Gaul as "pacification." "The military is acutely aware that the reason for its existence is to wage war, and war means killing people and the deaths of American soldiers as well," he states. "Because the reality of war and its consequences are so harsh, the military almost instinctively turns to doublespeak when discussing war."

Doublespeak often suggests a noble cause to justify the death and destruction. Practically speaking, a democratic country cannot wage war without the popular support of its citizens. A well-constructed myth, broadcast through mass media, can deliver that support even when the noble cause itself seems dubious to the rest of the world.

Consider the now-famous phrase, "axis of evil," which was first used by President Bush in his Jan. 29, 2002 State of the Union address. The concept of an "axis," of course, evokes memories of the "Axis powers" of World War II and suggests an alliance or confederation of states that pose a significant danger precisely because of their common alignment – a menace greater than the sum of the parts. But, in fact, Iran and Iraq have been bitter adversaries for decades, and there is no pattern of collaboration between North Korea and the other two states. As for being "evil," while all three nations have been involved in horrible violations of human rights, so have many U.S.-supported nations, such as Colombia or Saudi Arabia. In reality, "axis of evil" is a term chosen to selectively stigmatize countries for the purpose of justifying military actions against them.

If the bad guys have an "axis," the good guys have a "coalition of the willing," to use the term preferred by Colin Powell and other U.S. officials and often repeated uncritically by major television news outlets. The word "coalition" attempted to evoke the feeling of international unity that existed in during the first Gulf War, when the first Bush administration persuaded the United Nations to endorse a broad international coalition of nations who came together to drive Iraq from Kuwait. At a press briefing on Mar. 20, 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, "This is not a unilateral action, as is being characterized in the media. Indeed, the coalition in this activity is larger than the coalition that existed during the Gulf War in 1991."

In truth, the so-called "coalition of the willing" was almost entirely a U.S.-British campaign, with virtually no military contribution from other countries except Australia.

The code names used to designate wars have also become part of the branding process through which war is made to seem noble. Rather than referring to the invasion of Panama as simply a war or invasion, it became Operation Just Cause. (Note also the way that the innocuous word "operation" becomes part of the substitute terminology for war.) The war in Afghanistan was originally named Operation Infinite Justice, a phrase that offended Muslims, who pointed out that only God can dispense infinite justice, so the military planners backed down a bit and called it Operation Enduring Freedom instead. For the invasion of Iraq, they chose Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In PR Week, columnist Paul Holmes examined the significance of the term. "It's possible, I suppose, that Iraqi freedom might be a by-product of this campaign," he wrote, "but to pretend that it's what the exercise is all about is intellectual dishonesty at its most perverse."

However, the phrase served as a powerful framing device. Television networks including Fox and MSNBC used Operation Iraqi Freedom as their tagline for the war, with the phrase appearing in swooshing, 3-D logos accompanied by imagery of flags and other symbols of patriotism. Other phrases favored by the Bush administration – "the disarmament of Iraq," "coalition forces," the "war on terror," "America strikes back" – appeared frequently in visual banners, graphics, and bottom-of-the-screen crawls, repeating and reinforcing the government's key talking points in support of war.

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