War In The Balkans: Double-speak and jaw-jaw from the `Ministry of Truth'

The Language of War

WINSTON CHURCHILL made his famous remark about it being better to "jaw-jaw than to war-war" in 1954. It has been a favourite of conciliators ever since, but it is possible to wonder now whether Churchill's chiming opposition has any real force any longer.

Jaw-jaw is war-war, these days, when statements from the combatants instantly enter a global arena to compete for the vital ground of public sympathies. This can take surreal forms - a conversation continuing when the possibilities of mutual understanding have long disappeared. On BBC2's Newsnight programme the other night, Jeremy Paxman could be seen going hand-to-hand with a Serb spokesman from the Ministry of Truth, but their exchange of loaded words was only a local detail in a much larger verbal fire-fight, one contested over international satellite transmissions.

The unusual conditions that prevail in this new terrain were underlined by one of the earliest statements made - the unequivocal statement that there was no intention to commit ground troops to fight for the cause, only to reinforce a victory. How often can a war of such trumpeted resolve have commenced with such a candid confession of the limits of resolution? The declaration broke the most elementary rule of tactics - that you should tell your enemy nothing that will assist him. It suggested to President Slobodan Milosevic that he had little to lose by initial defiance.

President Milosevic's failure to capitulate as the first bombs fell forced the war of words to move from the initial stand-off raids to its second, more dangerous, phase. Last week, addressing the House of Commons, the Prime Minister used words such as "repression" and "suppression", far more abstract in their force than terms such as "murder" or "slaughter", which have appeared more recently.

True, Mr Blair stripped Mr Milosevic of his honorific - thus giving the Serbian President, in terms of British journalistic practice, the same naked form of address as a convicted criminal. He used the words "ethnic cleansing" and "barbarism", too, but we still had not quite arrived at the fierce excoriations of last weekend. He ended with his sole formal courtesy, asking the House to join him in "urging President Milosevic to choose the path of peace".

On Thursday, Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, was also talking of "President Milosevic", and he, too, edged towards the graver indictments: President Milosevic, he said, "was the prime player in the war in Bosnia which gave our language the hideous term, `ethnic cleansing'", a judicious insinuation which fell some way short of outright accusation. Over the weekend George Robertson, the Secretary of State for Defence, put that right, with the first use of the word "genocide".

For some, this new tone is a kind of overkill - marking a thrill of panic in the advocates of bombing that public support might be waning, that there may be a slow leak in Nato's moral superiority which will need constant pumping to counter. For others, it simply marks the fact that a war of words is subject to the same rules of escalation as any other kind.

The Prussian general Clausewitz wrote once that "moderation in war is a logical absurdity". But this may be better understood by Serbia's verbal warriors than it is by ours - you will still find a finer example of total verbal war in Belgrade than Whitehall. A few days ago Serbian television carried this commentary: "Things have obviously not been going at all as they imagined they would for the criminals and aggressors against our country. That is why they have been trying from the very first day to justify in front of their public the crime and genocide.

"The problem is that [President Bill] Clinton wants to guarantee the rights not of all, but only of the Albanians. That is the problem, you stupid murderer, you Adolf Goebbels Clinton, you embarrassment and blemish on the United States and the world."

We have not yet reached that level of firepower but it may not be far off.