Honolulu Lite
Honolulu Lite
Iraq is winning the
war of windy wordsAlthough the United States might have Iraq outgunned militarily, the ancient Arab country has established airwave superiority with its Advanced Jargon Capabilities.
Iraqis might not be able to hit the side of a barn with a Scud missile, but they can hurl an insult with devastating effect. Baghdad is apparently well supplied with verbal weapons of mass inflection, as one of Saddam Hussein's sons proved when he fired off the line that U.S. soldiers' wives and mothers would "cry tears of blood." That's a pretty good line, scoring high on both emotional and visual impact, though not up there with his old man's characterization (mistaken, as it turns out) of the 1991 Gulf War as "the Mother of All Battles."
The Americans can't compete on the battlefield of jargon with the Iraqis. Their Larder of Loquaciousness has been heaped high by hundreds of years of flowery Arab-speak. Where Americans "speak softly and carry a big stick," Arabs "speak colorfully and carry a big thesaurus." Americans shoot from the lip, while Arabs shoulder-fire elaborate heat-seeking diatribes and injurious cluster barbs.
A recent Reuters story pointed out the Iraqi habit of calling coalition forces "an international gang of criminal bastards" and "jackasses of colonization."
Coalition spokesmen fired back lamely something to the effect of "we're going to beat this bozo," failing to invoke images of tears of blood or even tears of goat milk.
AT A MEETING of Muslim countries, the Iraqi representative told the Kuwaiti delegate to "shut up, you minion, you monkey!" The Kuwaiti, apparently tongue-tied by hanging out with too many vernacularly challenged westerners, simply left the room. I'm sure that a savagely witty retort occurred to the gentleman as soon as he was back at his hotel room because savagely witty retorts have a habit of doing that.
Someone, either Al Capone or Albert Einstein, I believe, said you can accomplish more with a kind word and a 200-megaton atomic bomb than you can with a kind word alone, which sums up why America does not have a huge stockpile of catchy insulting phrases to use on during war. That's too bad, because a modern army should be well rounded, equipped not just with awesome firepower and Meals Ready to Eat, but with bellicose bon mots.
I suggest that President Bush, in his next address to the country, refer to Saddam as the "odoriferous magnate of malignancy who sacrifices his people on the inscrutable altar of hyperbolic malefaction." That should send them scurrying to their bunkers in search of an English-Arab dictionary.
If that's too much of a mouthful for our admittedly sometimes tongue-twisted leader, maybe he can call the Iraqi leadership a "gang of criminal goat-milk-crying monkey boys." It may lack the elegant flourish of vintage Arab-speak, but we've got to start building up our AAA (Arsenal of Awesome Affronts) sometime.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com