the bog of warspeak

The rhetoric of war, especially the rhetoric of current "conflicts" is always worth analyzing for its unbelievable ability to reduce people to statistics. The rhetoric itself is dehumanizing and this dehumanization is the first step (I think) toward creating soldiers who can kill and still live with their actions. First, a disclaimer...I am not arguing that soldiers are mindless drones the military creates/shapes/orders to kill innocent people. What I am arguing, is that the highly crafted propagandic rhetoric of war creates the space of fear, hatred, cultural myopia, distance, and detachment necessary for non-psychopathic human beings to justify murder, torture, "carpet-bombing" and civillian casualities are just the every day business of war. That said, while the pictures of acts most Americans would not associate with "normal warfare" i.e. torture which as Susan Sontag pointed out (see "Regarding The Torture of Others" New York Times Magazine 4/23/04)includes by definition, "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted..." Why, if not for the spin doctoring rhetoric, do these acts "shock and awe" whereas the massive devastation caused by "smart bombs" "razing" and "carpet bombing fails to illicit similar outrage? Why do pictures of individuals abusing other (Othered) individuals warrant international outcry when international policy (often carried out in "normal warfare")creates (and has created) the chaos that birthed every genocide of the last century? Do we perhaps differentiate because to think critically on the ever twising rhetoric requires reflection on what it means to be both a "great democracy" AND THE LAST REMAINING "superpower" arguably singlehandedly capable of world domination/destruction? Where can/does the line of responsibility be drawn to legitimately seperate the actions of some vs the ignorance and complicity through silence of many? Will the inevitable "lessons of Iraq" teach us to keep Power in check or, will they (as the "lessons of Vietnam") simply teach us how to strut even more proudly with an even bigger stick/bomb/cause/propaganda campaign?