Targets of opportunity: George Tenet, the director of the CIA, marched into the White House on March 19 with an enticing suggestion for the president. The war against Iraq could be over within hours, he declared, because a ”target of opportunity” had presented itself.
This was bureaucratic-speak for the prize that has eluded the United States since Gulf War I — the location of President Saddam Hussein for hours to come.
US commanders have a list, running into thousands of pages, of targets in Iraq, ranging from Saddam’s presidential palaces to the headquarters of his Ba’ath party. These plain targets will be transformed into ”targets of opportunity” should a key member of the Iraqi leadership be spotted on site.
Decapitation exercise: Military commanders normally deploy abstract and cold language to describe the horrors of war. But in a rare display of honesty, US officials described the overnight precision bomb attack as a ”decapitation exercise”.
Such a mission is designed to kill the leadership of a hostile regime, or, as US officials describe it, to ”cut the head off the snake”, ensuring the collapse of the regime once the leadership is gone.
They hope that nobody will object to such stark language, calculating that few will shed a tear if Saddam or his closest cronies die.
Little Bush: George W Bush, like his father, towers over most world leaders. But to Saddam, the president is just ”little Bush”, the oldest son of the man who failed to dislodge him from power in 1991.
Even his harshest critics admit that Saddam has a knack for voicing phrases that then enter the lingua franca. Everyone now talks of the ”mother of” as a form of emphasis after he pledged to launch the ”mother of all battles” in 1991.
Speed bumps: It may be the street furniture in Kuwait, where sleeping policemen are ubiquitous, which inspired this US military metaphor. A speed bump is an obstacle on the way to capturing a strategic prize — like Baghdad, say — which does not stop you, but slows you down.
It is an indication of the way the Pentagon views the military opposition that it does not expect to stop for enemy tanks or artillery or trenches. It is far more concerned about non-military obstacles, such as swampy terrain, escarpments, blown-up bridges and, in particular, civilians.
Likely human speed bumps are what aid agencies call IDPs (internally displaced persons) and civilians who do not attempt to flee, but besiege the advancing troops with requests for food, water and medicine.
Self-legitimating: Bush, who has inherited his father’s famous grasp of the English language, has dreamt up this awkward phrase to describe how the world will embrace his war.
France, Russia, China and virtually every other major power opposed to the war will see the error of their ways when hundreds of thousands of cheering Iraqis greet allied troops on the streets of Baghdad. At that stage the war will be ”self-legitimating”.
Killboxes: Some might regard this term as a refreshingly honest departure by the military,which has a habit of cloaking its work in abstract language. To others, it will be seen as disturbingly bloodthirsty.
Killboxes are grid squares, measuring 91km2, into which Royal Airforce Tornados fire their Paveway laser-guided bombs. A ”hot” killbox contains a specific target posing a direct threat to troops.
This is a far cry from the 1991 Gulf War, when US commanders laughed as they replayed cockpit video clips of pilots dropping their bombs.
Uprise: General Wesley Clark, the former Nato supreme allied commander, maintained the military tradition of mangling the English language this week. ”They didn’t uprise,” he complained to CNN about the failure of the people of Basra to fulfil the coalition’s expectations of an uprising against Saddam Hussein. ”The simple fact is that the liberation didn’t quite occur.”
The remarks by Clark, who was accused by the British of nearly starting world war three during the 1999 Kosovo campaign, came amid a war of words among the US’s armchair generals over the relatively light numbers of troops sent to Iraq.
Supply nodes: This term describes the latest rage in the Pentagon. As troops surge through Iraq towards Baghdad they have established small battlefield depots, known as supply nodes, to provide supplies for their forces. These are abandoned when troops move on.
Open sources: Amid the fog, or sandstorm, of war the military often do not have a clue what is going on. This is the term used by military spokesmen when they have to rely on reports by journalists to tell them what is happening. With hundreds of journalists ”embedded” with the military, many reports are unlikely to come as a great surprise, however. — Â