NEW YORK -- During war, news manipulation comes to the fore; so does language manipulation. In the latest war against Iraq, as in the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon sold a "Star Wars" depiction of U.S. technological prowess, blithely hiding the carnage it created. And many American news organizations happily bought it.
The happiest of the lot, some media watchers have pointed out, was the domestic part of CNN. As Russell Smith, the Toronto Globe and Mail columnist, wrote, it simply passed along the Pentagon's version of the war: "It describes the exploding of Iraqi soldiers in their bunkers as 'softening up'; it describes slaughtered Iraqi units as being 'degraded'; some announcers have even repeated the egregious Pentagon neologism 'attrited.' " (His column is reprinted in The New York Review of Books, May 29, 2003).
What does "attrite" (or "attrit") mean? In a February 1996 speech titled "Air Power and the American Way of War," Gen. Ronald Fogleman, U.S. Air Force chief of staff, used the word to characterize American military strategy since the 1800s as relying on "the creation of large masses of forces that would employ mass, concentration and firepower to attrit enemy forces." The updated American Heritage Dictionary says it means "to destroy or kill (troops, for example) by use of firepower." It is a back-formation of "attrition."