Trumps war of words
Politicians in Western nations rarely resort to threatening language – chiefly because that threat is regularly demonstrated in real wars
Faisal Al Yafai
After Donald Trumps unexpectedly bellicose language against North Korea, threatening Pyongyang with fire and fury, journalists went scrambling through the history books to find similarly fiery language from previous American presidents.
The best they came up with was Harry S Trumans threat to unleash a rain of ruin from the air against Japan if they did not surrender during the Second World War. But Truman was speaking in August 1945, mere hours after the United States had indeed unleashed exactly that, dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Two days later, Truman followed up with a second rain of ruin against Nagasaki.
Beyond that extraordinary moment, in the modern era, threats from western politicians rarely utilise fiery language. Most often, they are couched in careful warnings and vague threats even during the march to war.
In the run-up to the Iraq invasion of 2003, the worst threat against Saddam Hussein that George W Bush issued was to say that the US would not allow the worlds worst weapons to remain in the hands of the worlds worst leaders. If that wasnt clear, Bush followed it up with: The dictator of Iraq will fully disarm or the US...will disarm him. Threats of fire and brimstone were curiously absent.
But why? With so much of politics about coercion and force, and with many politicians across the world regularly using bloodcurdling language, why is it that those who control some of the worlds best-armed militaries are reluctant to engage in bellicose verbal jousting?
The reason is surprisingly straightforward. Western countries have no need to use fiery language because the results of their actual fire is clear for all to see. The west has regularly engaged in real military combat, meaning that their threats are regularly demonstrated. The words are redundant.
The US dropped more than 24,000 bombs on Iraq and Syria just last year, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. That is to say nothing of the drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan. British politicians used diplomatic language, but dropped actual Brimstone missiles large air-to-surface missiles that cost more than US$200,000 (Dh750,000) each on both Syria and Iraq. France and Canada dropped thousands more.
The results of all this weaponry are clear to see. Destroyed buildings, broken bodies, wrecked communities. There is no need for threats; opponents need only switch on the television screens to the see what western weapons will do to their children and cities.
In 2003, Saddam Hussein needed no fearsome threats to know what the US intended to unleash against Iraq: the countrys cities had already been set ablaze a decade earlier, and depleted uranium in weapons had already resulted in babies born without eyes or limbs.
This is deliberate, of course. Diplomatic language covers the reality of war for western citizens who fund those weapons. By couching wars in the language of law, or rights, or morality, western politicians can obscure for their citizens what war actually means while at the same time being sure that even without threatening language, the missiles will sufficiently demonstrate the threat.
Politicians themselves are acutely aware of this demonstration effect. Just last week, declassified secret documents from the UK government showed a British defence minister during the build-up to the first Gulf War pointing out that attacking Iraq would represent an unparalleled opportunity to show off Britains weapons to those who may wish to purchase them. Iraq, wrote Alan Clark, then defence procurement minister, could be a vast demonstration range with live ammunition and real trials. That those demonstrations would mean shattering Iraqi cities and shedding Iraqi blood went without comment.
Bellicose language is more common from regimes like North Korea or Iran, countries that claim that their military build-up is primarily defensive. Repeated fiery language, therefore, and frequent public displays of military hardware, are necessary, they would say, to stave off threats from more powerful opponents.
The same is true even for non-state groups. Hizbollahs fiery language against Israel toned down after the 2006 war, when the Lebanese group fought Israels military to a standstill. Hizbollah had no need for flowery boasts because of what had happened on the battlefield. The same is still true today: since Hizbollah went to war for the Assad regime, the group has become far more confident of its fighting ability. The demonstration effect means fierce words are not needed.
Such a display of military plumage is not limited to the non-western world. This summer, for the first time, Nato troops performed a significant military drill on the Lithuanian border, a warning to Russia that the Baltic countries can count on the military alliance to defend them from any aggression. After Russias annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and indeed its successful involvement in the Syrian civil war it is Russia, not the west, that enjoys the demonstration effect. Nato is scrambling to demonstrate its will to use military power.
The US military, in particular, has often been keen to use slang and doublespeak to smooth over the wrinkles.
Think about the first Gulf War in 1991 or the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Both conflicts were laden with benign terms such as surgical strikes, a phrase that eased the consciences of Americans who had been scarred by the carpet-bombing of the Vietnam War, which itself is a soft term for a particularly virulent form of saturation munitions. Then there was friendly fire and collateral damage, which somehow turn bad news into something less unpalatable.
Arguably the peak example of such doublespeak also found infamy in the 2003 US-led invasion. In the build-up to the intervention, military chiefs talked broadly about their battle plan, dressing up a proposed fierce assault on Baghdad as a shock and awe campaign, a term coined years earlier at the National Defence University.
The phrase was particularly effective in hoodwinking the US public into believing that shock and awe could help the military avoid a messy ground war and in obscuring the likely level of civilian casualties on the ground.
Experts believe that civilian deaths amounted to more than 6,640 people (or more than 300 per day) during the three-week shock and awe offensive on Baghdad a bitter truth that deviated far from the dominant US narrative of precise and surgical strikes on military targets and little or none of that collateral damage.
The practice also extends to naming conventions for weaponry and munitions, but in this we can detect that the doublespeak is often more forceful. US military missile names include the conventional (Patriot), the doom-laden (Hellfire) and the menacing (Tomahawk).
But it has not always been this way. More than 70 years ago, the US dropped two nuclear bombs Little Boy and Fat Man that levelled the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and forced Japan to surrender arms and end the Second World War.
The bombs names were plundered from popular culture: Fat Man was a character from the 1941 movie The Maltese Falcon. Little Boy was initially called Thin Man, after Dashiell Hammetts 1930s novel, but eventually morphed into the name that history now records. Compare these to MOAB, the Mother of All Bombs (also referred to as GBU-43/B), dropped some time ago on ISIL operatives in Afghanistan.
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