Connect: The obscenity began with "Operation Infinite Justice". It soon moved on to "Shock and Awe". One year ago, although the term has only recently become widely known, the vileness reached "Shake and Bake".
To people in the US "Shake 'n' Bake" is a food additive made by Kraft. It's a seasoning put into a plastic bag with chicken and shaken before baking.
In Iraq American soldiers use the term to refer to combining the use of white phosphorous and high explosives. Internet "bloggers" ferreted out an article published by the US army's Field Artillery Magazine in its issue of March/April this year.
The article, written by a captain, a first lieutenant and a sergeant, was a review of the attack on Fallujah in November, 2004.
"White phosphorous proved to be an effective and versatile munition," it said. "We used it for screening missions and as a potent psychological weapon against insurgents in trench lines and spider holes where we could not get them with high explosives. We fired 'Shake and Bake' missions using white phosphorous to flush them out and high explosives to take them out."
Charming! While "Shock and Awe" suggests a visual, high-profile, showbiz overstatement, "Shake and Bake" evokes a homely, domestic, family scene. You can easily imagine the gratuitously upbeat jingle that accompanies television and radio ads for the seasoning. It connotes family lunches, kitchen smells, gingham aprons - all the cosy images of snug domesticity.
That's why its use in Iraq - ironic, knowing, sneering - is so disgusting. Military people consistently use euphemisms to minimise atrocity, of course, but "Shake and Bake" sounds so cynical it's practically cackling. After all, it results in people - including women, children and non-combatant men - being agonisingly burnt to the bone with a roasting chemical.
That's what white phosphorous does to the human body. It burns it slowly and torturously. It is clearly a chemical weapon, although some military people accept such a description only when white phosphorous is used to do harm through its toxic properties. Saddam Hussein allegedly used it against the Kurds and the US considered it a chemical weapon then.
It was an Italian documentary, screened on RAI, the country's state media outlet, that has shown the use of this chemical terror weapon in the destruction of Fallujah. So now, in addition to lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, "Shock and Awe", Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, a network of hidden gulags and torture chambers, we hear that the US is using chemical weapons.
All of this comes on top of torture stories about cigarettes being extinguished on prisoners' bodies, about toe-nails being plucked out, about electrodes being attached to torture victims' genitals, about alleged beatings with cables, about salt being rubbed into fresh wounds . . . if even half the allegations are true, the white, so-called Christian world is yet again rotting from the top.
Then there's the revelation that George Bush considered taking military action against the Arabic TV station Al-Jazeera. Some of its staff have been killed in suspicious circumstances already. How much more evidence is required before supporters of the invasion of Iraq acknowledge that the entire Bush and Blair escapade has been obscene from the start?
It's not good enough to say that Saddam Hussein was a dreadful dictator and that therefore the invasion has been justified. Of course, Saddam was a thug - one empowered by the West, mind. But the positive by-product of toppling him does not remotely justify the pollution of the West with lies and the destruction of a country that had, remember, nothing to do with attacking the US.
Language always gives the intentions away. If your goals are reasonable and just, there is no need for the excesses of PR speak or ad speak. Straight talk is better. As soon as the campaign against Afghanistan was labelled "Operation Infinite Justice" (even though it was soon renamed) it was clear that only a huckster's outfit could possibly have coined such an ignorant name.
That name called attention to the gloss rather than the substance of the campaign. In that, it was, of course, in keeping with the language of advertising which tries to sell people a concept or a feeling rather than a product. Eat X chocolate, wear Y shoes, drive Z car and people of the opposite sex will find you utterly irresistible. Blah, blah, blah. You know the routine.
But some aspects of life are graver and more intricate than flogging chocolate, shoes or cars to potential punters. Any enterprises in which life and death are certain outcomes are demeaned by ad speak.
As a propaganda phrase, "Operation Infinite Justice" is so inept it's risible, pathetic and idiotic. It set the tone though and showed how neocon activists believed their own dope.
Now "Shake and Bake" is a phrase that highlights just how dehumanised its users have become. The irony of its associations with domesticity contrasted with the depravity it describes in Iraq is a mark of the awfulness of the Bush and Blair campaign. It deserves to become the "Arbeit Macht Frei" of its age.