Euphemism represents failure in Iraq

By SEAN KELLY

A euphemism is when someone comes up with a nice phrase to sugarcoat something unpleasant. Occasionally, these are necessary, even polite – we tell a child their beloved goldfish has “passed away,” because “Goldy’s gone to that big porcelain bowl in the sky” isn’t exactly delicate.

When employed by a government, however, euphemisms become doublespeak, code words to blunt the effect of failures and carefully balance rhetoric to avoid getting in trouble. Under a skilled master, one can receive oral sex from an intern and still say, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” with a straight face. It’s all in the definition you’re using.

Since 2003, we’ve run into hundreds of euphemisms and doublespeak definitions for the horrors of war. The longer we fight, the longer the administration has to sand off the rough edges of the national discourse, leaving us with something easy to swallow.

Pretty soon, it’s going to be hard to watch any press conference without an interpreter. Until we get one of those, I’ve crafted a quick reference guide so you can see what’s really being said when we talk about the war:

• Casualty: According to Merriam-Webster, a casualty is “a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment or capture, or through being missing in action.” Our government casualty lists downplay as much as possible the tens of thousands of soldiers who have been injured or wounded in combat. Iraqi casualties aren’t much reported at all.

• Collateral damage: This is when we accidentally kill the wrong people. Oops. Makes the screw-ups at our jobs take on a bit of perspective, doesn’t it?

• Civilian contractor: Unlike the U.S., where a contractor is a guy who overcharges us for drywalling the rec room, in Iraq, the bulk of contractors belong to private military firms such as Blackwater, who make six times more than the average U.S. soldier. In a two-year span, Blackwater was involved in 195 shooting incidents. Blackwater fired first in 163 of those cases, according to the BBC.

• Enemy combatant: What’s in a name? A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet. If you call it an “enemy combatant,” however, it has no legal rights as a criminal or rights under the Geneva Convention afforded to enemy soldiers. To be fair to Shakespeare, he lived in a world before George Orwell.

• Enhanced interrogation: Torture is illegal unless you call it “enhanced interrogation.” Oddly, this naming logic doesn’t extend to any other areas of life. If I tell my girlfriend that what I was doing with her sister was a “copulation rehearsal,” she’ll still call me a cheating jerk.

• Sectarian violence: Civil war. Our current strategy of standing in the middle of an armed conflict between two sides that bitterly hate each other is cribbed directly from “A Fistful of Dollars.”

• Stop-loss: This is when the armed forces like you so much that they call you back on stage for an encore. This polite term has gone by other names in the past, such as “dragooning,” “getting Shanghaied” and “involuntary servitude.”

• Surge: Surge was a really sugary soda from my childhood. In the war, it’s also a 20,000-troop escalation that we started last year. It was supposed to accomplish six things, according to the White House: Let the Iraqis lead, help Iraqis protect the population, isolate extremists, create space for political progress, diversify political and economic efforts and situate the strategy in a regional approach. I’m not going to say the surge accomplished nothing, but we may have been better suited sending 20,000 cans of the sugary soda from my childhood.

The opposite of euphemism is “dysphemism.”

In times such as this, when horrible things are happening, we shouldn’t be afraid to speak plainly about what’s being done in our names. Cut out this list, keep it somewhere near the TV or where you read your news, and the next time you see a pretty word, cross it out and replace it with an ugly one.