A rchive Date
[ 07-04-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/1842422
Shock and awe: our fighting words
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
March 29, 2003, 1:21AM
DONALD Rumsfeld, long before beginning his second tour as defense secretary, said in 1999 that the U.S.-led bombing to stop the slaughter in Kosovo should have begun with a massive strike: "There is always a risk in gradualism. What it doesn't do is shock and awe and alter the calculations of people you're dealing with."
The phrase reappeared in January 2003, when CBS News reported that current Pentagon war plans called for a shock and awe bombardment of Baghdad if war came.
Columnists pounced on the vivid phrase. After President Bush told a news conference that "when it comes to our security, we really don't need anybody's permission," Mary McGrory, critical of the U.S. position, wrote dryly in the Washington Post, "In other words, let the shock and awe begin."
Rumsfeld picked up the phrase, and possibly the strategy, from a publication in 1996 of a future-oriented work at the National Defense University titled Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, by Harlan K. Ullman, James P. Wade and five other members of a study group. The authors sought to go beyond the defense doctrine encapsulated by the phrases "overwhelming force," "dominant battlefield awareness" and "dominant maneuver."
Shock and awe is required, they wrote, when "psychological and intangible, as well as physical and concrete, effects beyond the destruction of enemy forces and supporting military infrastructure will have to be achieved."
All of which means that the goal is to hit very hard right at the start so as to make everybody on the other side feel that resistance is hopeless and quit. The explication of the strategy is turgid, but its title is a grabber.
The current war also has given rise to the term "freedom fries."
"An Order of Fries, Please, but Do Hold the French" was the headline in The New York Times over an article about an outbreak of France-bashing at the U.S. Capitol.
Rep. Bob Ney, chairman of the committee responsible for House operations, ordered the word French stricken from all of the chamber's menus: henceforth, the potatoes laden with cholesterol were to be labeled "freedom fries." The Ohio congressman, who is of French descent and who speaks the language fluently, was immediately assailed by Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts for "making Congress look even sillier than it sometimes looks."
At any rate, the retaliatory nomenclature was instantly spoofed: What was to be next -- freedom toast, freedom dressing?
Would orchestras feature a freedom horn? Would lovers now turn away from the French kiss?
The jingoistic practice of changing the language to ride with current political tides was most prevalent in World War I, when sauerkraut temporarily became liberty cabbage or pickled vegetables, hamburger was referred to as Salisbury steak, Germania Life Insurance became Guardian Life and dachshunds were called liberty pups. (Frankfurters had earlier become known as hot dogs. About the only common phrase with the name of our enemy in it that was left largely intact during that war was German measles.)
The English language is resilient, resistant to manipulation; after our irritation with French foreign policy passes, members of the House of Representatives will go back to gorging themselves on french fries.
Safire is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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