The Trump administration takes pleasure in deploying dysphemism to describe the killing of Iranians
On 23 March, Donald Trump said that if things didn’t go to his liking in Iran, “we just keep bombing our little hearts out”. A week later the US president told journalists on Air Force One: “You never know with Iran because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up.”
On 4 March, Pete Hegseth squirmed in pleasure as he described “death and destruction from the sky all day long”. Whatever happened to the subtle art of political euphemism?
The UK had a secretary at war long before it ever had a minister of defence, and the US did not rename its department of war to “defense” until after the second world war. People sniggered when Trump and Hegseth announced that “department of war” would be its new name, but that might be charitably taken as a macho refusal to mince words. The many overseas adventures of the US military since 1945, after all, have not all been exclusively defensive.
Official names for military actions are usually mealy-mouthed: the US invasion of Panama in 1989 was called Operation Just Cause, while the last Gulf war, as everyone remembers fondly, was Operation Iraqi Freedom. The name for the current war, Operation Epic Fury, certainly sounds more like a teenage boy’s idea of comic-book armageddon.
