Deconfliction: If Leaders Speak in Jargon, Beware

This week I learned a new word: deconfliction. I wasn't exactly sure what it meant. It sounded generally positive and appropriate to U.S. efforts to defuse the tense situation created by Russian aerial bombing of Syria. But then I looked up the definition in the Oxford English dictionary. Deconfliction seeks to "reduce the risk of collision between (aircraft, airborne weaponry, etc.) in an area by coordinating their movements." So it is a word that, once understood, reveals the poverty of U.S. response: negotiations between two armed behemoths over how to avoid bumping into each other while they go about opposing policies that drop bombs with lots of "collateral damage" (coincidental civilian carnage) while seeking "targets of opportunity" (people and places for destruction). I comment on this in a blog about writing because it is an illustration of how much words matter, and not just to writers. According to an Oct. 1 article in Great Britain's The Guardian newspaper, "deconfliction" is a piece of jargon that appeared in U.S. military parlance in the mid-1970s, entered into Pentagon Gulf War reports in 1991, was wielded by Pentagon doublespeak master Donald Rumsfeld in 2006, and now is popping up in the mouths of President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. For a nice example of how to use the word deconfliction in a sentence, I turn to Brit Hume, a commentator with whom I don't generally agree, who summed up in a tweet: "Russian general to U.S.: We're bombing Syria in an hour. Get out of the way. Sec'y Kerry: We need a deconfliction discussion." Whenever leaders use jargon to conceal, abstract, excuse, dehumanize, euphemize and generally confuse the public, George Orwell turns over in his grave. His warning that "in our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible" has gone unheeded. I fear we may be better informed by Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary, where politics is defined as "a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles." For Orwell's prescient essay "Politics and the English Language," see http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/