"Degraded?"

There has been much ado in the papers and electronic media these past days about te Republican Guard surrounding Baghdad, its size, strength, and capabilities. Most of it has been rank speculation, fed by tidbits from CENTCOM, and who knows how much, if any, of what they have been tossing out is true.

More disturbing is the deeper push into the bizarro land of euphemism. As US troops approach Baghdad, air power and ground based artillery has been striking at the various divisions of the Republican Guard, "softening them up" for the inevitable full frontal assault. The terms used to describe the results of these attacks is interesting. On the one hand there is "heavy damage." I've seen heavy damage, to cars in accidents, towns following tornadoes, cities after full scale bombings. "Heavy damage" is not ordinarily a term that I imagine would be used to describe what must in fact be happening - human death on a wide scale. CENTCOM won't even say that they are "inflicting heavy casualties" on the Iraqi divisions around Baghdad. They prefer "heavy damage," then go on to characterize those same divisions as being at "50% effectiveness or less," which I must presume to mean that half of the men in those divisions have been killed or wounded severely enough to keep them from fighting. So why not say so?

The further descent into weirdness comes with the term "degradation," as in "the Republican Guard divisions have degraded by 50%." I'm not sure that qualifies as English, much less anything that a normal person can realistically understand. Are the people in those divisions rotting away? Have they some horrible new disease? Ebola, perhaps? Shall we call the World Health Organization? The CDC?

All of this euphemistic weirdness, delivered through stony faces beneath the glitzy lights at CENTCOM is beyond creepy, but when it is coupled with the refusal to issue body counts for Iraqi military personnel and especially civilians ("We don't do body counts," as Herr General Tommy Franks said) it becomes clear that the White House and Pentagon don't trust the American people with the simple facts. Why they fear their own citizenry over these issues is a question none of them would deign to answer in public, but the conclusion is fairly obvious, even through all of the linguistic smoke.