Words of War and Deception, and The Obscenity of "God on Our Side."

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If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war... _{Bob Dylan 1963}

And still we wait....

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Deception, lies, spin, before and after the fact. That's what characterises our political leadership. Weasel words bent into new forms to manipulate opinion, misrepresent facts, and submerge the truth. In time of war, it gets worse. Create a powerful enough perception, build enough credible fear by staying resolutely 'on message', often in direct conflict with visible truth (for those willing to see), inflame enough outrage, and reality can take a back seat.

Of course, Governments lying to and manipulating sections of their citizenry is not a new phenomenon, as you'll see from this retrospective view; which starts with a recent example that has its roots in the European colonisation of America. But is more focused on the mix of untruth, unethical actions, and the unintended but fatal consequences of wrong word choices that distinguished the George W Bush era.

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When I heard about the furore over the ‘Geronimo’ naming of the Osama bin Laden take-down mission, my first thought was, "Here we go again, why can't these guys understand the power of words, and the need to get it right?", which immediately brought to mind the way I used to cringe during the days when G. Dubbya Bush was in control.

OK, maybe not in control, but in front of the camera....

More about G Dubbya coming up very soon, but let's stay with Geronimo for the moment.

(By the way, I know we've seen that mission photo a million times, but have you ever really looked at it? I mean, really looked at it? Check out the back row..)

Anyway, and from outside the USA, I think any attempts by the Obama Administration to explain / rationalise / justify the crass and ill-considered use of Geronimo’s name for the mission, would have been pointless. If they’d thought it through first, or thought about it at all, they’d have realised it wasn’t worth inciting the predictable level of offence that it caused to the Native American people. Now, the damage, whether insensitive or inadvertent, is done. And can't be undone. The saga of the mission, under the Geronimo name, is already an indelible part of history. I’m just thankful no-one inadvertently described the USA’s self-proclaimed ‘right’ to conduct a mission in Pakistan, without telling Pakistan, as another Manifest Destiny.

For those who may not be familiar, Manifest Destiny was the term coined to justify the forced dispossession of tribal lands, and the mass slaughter of virtually the entire ‘Savage Indian’ population, to make room for white settlers in North America. “The doctrine or belief prevalent in the 19th century that the United States had the God-given right to expand into and possess the whole of the North American continent.” ^Encarta

That's pretty heavy stuff, and it's our first lesson in the use of words as weapons of mass deception. If your objective is to take something as precious as land from its rightful owners, using violent and lethal means, and still sleep nights, you need to clearly define those people as The Enemy. People less worthy than you. People whose rights don't matter as much as yours. 'Native' people who are less civilised, less human, because they belong to tribes, live in the wild, in tents, not houses. And their skin isn't white. It's all about dehumanisation and demonisation.

Oh, as well as having God on your side.

The language of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny is cold, unemotional, detached, and as a result, probably doesn't sound unreasonable to people who already believe they have a genetic superiority, and anyway, God has apparently told them directly that it's their right.

But, if we were to paraphrase the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and express the colonialist aims in honest terms, we'd have to say something more like; "It's our right, as whites, to occupy as much of this native land as we want, and by God, we intend to take it all. So what if we have to murder and maim every last wild injun man, woman and child to get it, they're just savages. Not like us, why, they don't even go to church on Sundays".

But, however it was expressed, Manifest Destiny meant only one thing for the man we're talking about here. "Out of the way, Geronimo. Your land is our land now, loser."

At the height of the Geronimo mission naming debate I read the pat comeback comments from some non-Native Americans, the ones displaying the predictably low level of insight and high level of abuse, that stems from that inhumane doctrine, and subsequent dehumanisation of ‘injuns’ that persists in some quarters today. You probably did too, so there’s no need to sidetrack down that dead-end alley. Although, if you happen to agree with those sentiments, there’s equally no point in sticking around here; you’ll probably only upset yourself as we move ahead.

Few things are more powerful than words. They have the ability to touch us at all emotional levels. Reflect love; breed hate. Express desire; spurn attention. Inspire noble deeds; incite acts of violence. Spread calm; threaten harm. Expose truth; conceal deceit. Rationalise; dehumanise; demonise. Words are the most powerful weapons we have. In times of war, they’re manipulated and misused and massaged into weapons of mass deception. As we've seen from the above, ‘Manifest Destiny’ was no more than a holier-than-thou label for a program to not only sanitise genocide, but to proselytise it. What better way to keep God on our side?

Notice I didn’t say words have the potential to become weapons of mass deception. The unchallengeable truth is, that truth itself, is always the first casualty of war. There’s nothing moot about this point. Lies are told, and lives are lost. Not only enemy lives. The calculated, planned loss of the lives of members of a country’s own armed forces is a form of ‘collateral damage’ that was a part of war long before those particular words were coined to describe it. Statistical dehumanisation (eg ‘troop casualties’), has always been the accepted technique for rationalising ‘the loss of a few, for the good of the many’. And, to be fair, that has to be an acceptable proposition in wartime.

Just make sure you’re a General, not a grunt.

But, back to George W Bush, and the Geronimo mission, and what links the two together, in my mind.

The passions of many Americans (not only Native Americans) were aroused and inflamed by the seemingly ill-considered choice of Geronimo as the bin Laden mission name. We live in an age of political awareness, and supposed sensitivity to the cultural differences between ethnic groups, so the obvious question is, why didn't they call it something uncontentious? I realise it would have had to be unique and memorable. I gave it two minutes thought, and came up with, 'Operation XT'. Which would have morphed into 'XTract', if the target didn’t give the Seals a reason to take him down by, say, moving; or to 'XTerminate', if he did. Post-mission, it's 'XTC' all round. (State of mind, not drugs.)

Who could've taken offence at that?

On the other hand, many other people were saying “Who gives a rat’s anyway? We’ve been playing cowboys and injuns, leaping into swimming holes, and parachuting out of aeroplanes, yelling "Geronimoooo", forever. What's the big deal all of a sudden?”

I have no idea what the answer is to that conundrum. And of course, being an issue affecting the American Indian sub-population, it's all died down now anyway. Out of mind, out of sight, if you'll excuse my intentional mangling...

But here’s the link that bothers me:

The use of unnecessarily crass, and inappropriately inflammatory wording, in apparent ignorance, or perhaps blatant disregard, of that aspect, occurred with embarrassing frequency during the George W Bush administration. The reason I think it matters to look back to those times is because I believe the consequences of the poor word choices in much of the Bush rhetoric on Iraq, can be measured in thousands of deaths and casualties that may not otherwise have had to happen.

So, when I think back to the apparently similar ‘inadvertent word usage’ in the more recent Geronimo affair, even though it was nowhere near the same matter of life and death, (except for O.b.L. of course), I wonder whether any lessons were learned, or will ever be learned, about the power of words to convey implicit meanings, separate to the literal, and about the dangers of getting it wrong. Or, whether no-one really thinks it matters?

To illustrate what I'm talking about, let's start with the invasion of Iraq:

Quite apart from the fact that Osama bin Laden wasn’t there, nor proven to be a buddy of Saddam Hussein's, when George Bush proudly proclaimed ‘Operation Shock and Awe’ (later changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom, but by then the genie was out of the bottle) and authorised the misplaced 9/11 payback invasion and occupation of Iraq, did no-one in the Defense Department’s ‘Operation-Naming Section’ think about the connection to Hitler’s brutal Blitzkrieg strategy, when he invaded Poland?

The literal translation of Blitzkrieg is “Lightning War”, but its lightning speed is a function of its more generally understood meaning, and its mind-numbing effect, 'shock and awe'. Overwhelming force, and overwhelming terror, delivered hard and fast. Without mercy. Literally, a knockout blow that stuns the target senseless, and paralyses its ability to react.

It's beyond belief that Bush ever intended to invoke Hitler, in the same way as it's hard to believe the bin Laden mission planners really felt that Geronimo would have loved the idea of his being its code name. Which begs the question: Were both merely 'unfortunate mistakes' with word choices, caused by not paying enough attention to their implicit nuances?

NB: For any military enthusiasts who may be reading this, I'm aware that the Blitzkrieg / 'shock and awe' strategy has been used by many other forces, some prior to Hitler's attack on Poland, and some since. Does Hiroshima ring a bell? I've chosen to ignore a quaint assertion in Wikipedia that "the doctrine was written by Ullman and Wade in 1996 and is a product of the national Defense University of the United States". (What?) The point is, we're dealing with perception here, and I believe that, in the eyes of most people, Hitler's Blitzkrieg invasion of Poland is most famously synonymous with 'shock and awe'.

Everybody knows that Hitler didn’t want to make friends with the Polish people, he wanted to take their country from them. By the use of overwhelming terror. (That’s why he didn’t bother giving the operation a cuddly name like, say, ‘Operation Polish Freedom’). How then, could the President of The United States use that same ‘Shock and Awe’ terminology, with all its attendant terrifying nuance, and that same tactic - dispensing random death from the night sky, against an unprepared population that had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda, or bin Laden, and certainly not 9/11 - yet somehow believe that US ground troops following up the attack would be seen not as invaders, but as liberators?

Wouldn’t it be perfectly predictable that many of those who survived the terror and mayhem of a ‘shock and awe’ attack would take up arms and fight back? Americans included, if the situation were reversed. (I’m not being cute, I’d fight back if somebody dropped an arsenal on my country. By mistake. Wouldn’t you?) Words of war and deception come into play again here; whether those fighting back would be hailed as ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘patriots’, or denigrated as ‘insurgent terrorists’ would simply be a matter of which side you were on. It's deceptive to say otherwise. But say it our leaders do. Remember the tactic - dehumanise, and demonise.

Surely, given the President’s stated aim, encapsulated in the mission name ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, subsequently evolved into ‘Operation New Dawn’ (Who writes this stuff?) there was a better way to go about it, than to announce an attack, and give CNN sufficient notice to set up multi-cam live coverage, so the rest of us could sit comfortably back and watch the World’s greatest superpower beat the crap out of Baghdad by night? I wonder how many Iraqi citizens awaiting the salvation from Saddam that Bush insisted they needed, were instead 'shocked' into becoming ‘insurgents' in just that one night?

Don’t ask me what that better way might have been. That’s way above my pay grade. Even so, I don’t think I’d have believed the deceptive ‘Shock and Awe’ words to the degree that led US commanders to send in insufficient combat troop numbers to establish control, and quell the early stages of the insurgency, thus making those who did go in more vulnerable, and, in my humble opinion (as per my earlier assertion about the wrong words / rhetoric) causing deaths and casualties that may not otherwise have had to happen.

Here’s an extract attributed to a Newsweek magazine article, (NB, unverifiable by me) shortly before the operation commenced;

‘Without a single American combat boot touching Iraqi soil, U.S. commanders believe the first 48 hours of the war will leave all but the staunchest of Hussein's military ready to surrender’.

Here’s an extract from a post-invasion analysis prepared by the US Army School of Military Studies;

‘The need for sufficient troops to provide law and order would have been more apparent if the civilian and military leadership had anticipated how the Iraqi people might receive occupation forces. Ahmed Chalabi’s infamous statement that Iraqis would greet troops with “sweets and flowers” was inaccurate. Despite warnings from the intelligence agencies and expert opinion to the contrary, senior leaders such as Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others, remained convinced that the people would welcome military forces as liberators’.

Note that George Bush is not mentioned, reinforcing my opening gambit about who was really in control...

Anyway, sorry, strayed a little off topic there, we're talking about language, not liberation.

As we saw with Manifest Destiny all those years ago, it's not all in the naming. Or mis-naming, to be more accurate. There's always a set of supporting words, to describe, and sell, any political objective. These days, 'staying on message' is something all politicians are coached to do by their handlers. In turn, that's part of a wider techique known as ‘perception management’; the black art of media (and event) manipulation, misinformation, and misdirection, practiced by governments, corporations and religions worldwide.

In the case of the US v Iraq, perception management showcases its talent with the claimed target of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ being the justification for invasion. The President spoke of hidden stockpiles of uranium, mobile weapons labs, potential nuclear capability, deadly nerve gas agents, and the likely scenario - 'becoming more likely the longer we delay taking action', of Saddam flicking enough gear to bin Laden and other unnamed associates to wreak unprecedented havoc against US and other Western targets. And he kept on speaking of them, even as Mohamed El Baradei’s IAEA inspectors failed to unearth physical proof, or compelling circumstantial evidence, of such weapons in Iraq. No matter, as I said at the beginning, create a powerful enough perception, build enough credible fear, inflame enough outrage, and reality can take a back seat.

Only after the invasion and Saddam's capture and execution, did Bush acknowledge the lack of cohesion surrounding the justification for, and objectives of, 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'. He didn't actually mean to, but 'ya know, it's kinda hard to remember everything real clearly'. (That's not a real quote, but there's plenty more 'crass confusion' in the accompanying video, if you haven't seen it before).

I was equally dismayed to hear Bush overplay the religion card when he proclaimed a ‘Crusade’; about as inflammatory a word as a President with a Christian God on his side could use when confronting a Muslim foe, and immediately escalating the perception beyond the declared ‘War on Terror’ to an implicitly broader perception that the real US agenda was Holy War against all Muslims.

Mounting a ‘Crusade’ is a big call. Did Bush really mean to make it, or was that another ‘inadvertent word choice' mistake? Either way, how many more marginalised Muslims connected more strongly to the anti-America mindset, as a consequence of his unnecessarily inflammatory use of the 'Crusade' word? Wouldn't 'War on Terror' have continued to suffice?

The 'perception management' list goes on, with Bush's hawk advisers exhorting, "We gotta show these ragheads the US means business". Obviously, I'm making that up, but how else do you explain the bully-boy taunt of “Bring 'em on!”?

I do have to say though, that I can't imagine the Bush speechwriters penning that little soundbite for the Prez. That's got to be another of those ill-considered word choices that Bush made all on his own. Surely, he's the only person in the World who didn't understand, when he uttered the ultimate in crass war words, 'Bring em on!' that the implicit message every parent of every US soldier took from them was, "What the hell, it’s not my kids out there in harm’s way".

It's certainly how I felt, when I watched this clip of the Commander in Chief of the world's largest military force puffing his chest and 'shushing' his audience like a College football coach at a pre-game press briefing. Except people die in the game of war. With or without God on their side.

All inflammatory words; and all later publicly ‘regretted’ by the President. But all too little, too late, to me.

Getting back to the bin Laden take-down mission, and more particularly the post-event questions, like, Is he really dead? Where's the footage? Why a respectful burial ? And why at sea? Where's the proof? etc, I've set out below an imaginary scenario to illustrate how readily we grant ourselves permission to believe what we hear, and take things at their face value, instead of maintaining a healthy scepticism about everything our political leaders tell us.

Here we go, pay attention now..

First, consider the demand for 'closure' that nowadays follows every major traumatic event, and the nagging uncertainty in the minds of a minority, about how Osama bin Laden 'came to be', ie; Who funded whom? Was it Saudi money? Was his early operation 'seeded' by secret US money fed through Saudi channels? Did the CIA make any deals with him? Did the CIA create him? - you know the kind of stuff I mean...

Bearing that in mind, imagine if a White House Press Secretary had stood before the cameras, and said in that special way they have of speaking as though everything is just that bit clearer to their 'world-weary' eyes, than to the rest of us, “We’re releasing this extract from a speech we’ve uncovered from the intel, because it provides further support for the need for us to have taken the action we did, and clearly illustrates the ideologically distorted view that this individual held about our country, our freedom, and our democratic way of life. And the risk he posed to those ideals”, and then read you what’s written below, you’d have accepted the Government's account, and the extract itself as truth, wouldn't you?

“We have good and just reasons to believe we have ample grounds to accuse the Americans of injustice, especially when such great acts of injustice have been committed by them upon (us), of which they seem to have no manner of regard, or even to reflect.”

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The truth is that those words were uttered. But, if you assumed (in the context of this article 'took it at face value, and were ready to believe') that Osama bin Laden said them, you’d be wrong.

As we’re approaching the end of the article, it would be a perfect segue if I could state that Geronimo made that statement. He didn’t, but close.

It was actually Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, addressing his adversary, General William Henry Harrison in 1810, at Vincennes, in the Indiana Territory, on the continuing injustice of his people being brutalised, starved, lied to and having to endure forced relocation away from their spiritual homelands, by the US Government.

But hey, what did Tecumseh know? He was just a ‘savage Indian’, right?

Or, was he man who, despite being driven to despair through enduring the awful effects of state sponsored terrorism (to give it its real name), and genocidal policy, enshrined in the "God on our side" doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and by the routine breaking of treaties by duplicitous Government administrations, refused to be cowed by words of war and deception, into accepting that he and his people, for the crime of being different, should simply lie down and die in the face of such injustices, instead of taking up arms and fighting back?

At this point, by my taking Tecumseh's words out of context, and 'mentally imposing' them into that imaginary scenario, you may be thinking that I'm trying to associate the ideology of Osama bin Laden with that of the great Indian chiefs, like Tecumseh. I'm certainly not. The exact reverse, in fact.

What I'm trying to illustrate is how easily incorrect and inappropriate perceptions can be formed, and in light of the history we've just reviewed, and the still unresolved issues affecting Native American spiritual homeland rights, how entitled I believe the American Indian people were to be appalled at the modern day US Government itself creating that evil association, by naming the Osama bin Laden mission Geronimo, and irrevocably linking those two names together for all time.

Especially if, like Bush's costly 'Crusade' in Iraq, it was really just another wrong word choice.

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