[Note for TomDispatch Readers: We’ve reached that moment in August when I take a brief break.  TD will be back either the Tuesday or Thursday after Labor Day. In the meantime, let me thank all of you readers who, in recent weeks, in response to my pleas, gave this site the sort of money it really does need to keep going.  You were wonderful and I simply can’t express my appreciation adequately!  But, as I’m sure you guessed, more is still needed (truly!) and so, in this break moment, I plead with any of you who have the urge to visit our donation page to do your damnedest.  Many, many thanks in advance.  You truly do make all the difference!

And for this break moment, I had the urge to post what I think is a classic “best of” TD piece from (yes!) 2009 by the superb Andrew Bacevich. All these years and events later, it still puts “the American century” in genuine — even unique — perspective.  Don’t miss it and, while you’re at it, consider getting a copy of his superb just-published first novel Ravens on a Wire about something he experienced personally — the U.S. military in the wake of the Vietnam War. Tom]

Imagine if, on the day in early April when Jiverly Voong walked into the American Civic Association Building in Binghamton, New York, and gunned down 13 people, you read this headline in the news: “Binghamton in shock as police investigate what some critics call ‘mass murder.'” If America’s newspapers, as well as the TV and radio news were to adopt that as a form, we would, of course, find it absurd. Until proven guilty, a man with a gun may be called “a suspect,” but we know mass murder when we see it. And yet, in one of the Bush administration’s lingering linguistic triumphs, even as information on torture programs pours out, the word “torture” has generally suffered a similar fate.

The agents of that administration, for instance, used what, in the Middle Ages, used to be known bluntly as “the water torture” — we call it “waterboarding” — 183 times in a single month on a single prisoner and yet the other morning I woke up to this formulation on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition: “…harsh interrogations that some consider torture.” And here’s how Gwen Ifill of the News Hour put it the other night: “A tough Senate report out today raised new questions about drastic interrogations of terror suspects in the Bush years.” Or as USA Today typically had it: “Obama opened the door for possible investigation and prosecution of former Bush administration officials who authorized the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that critics call torture.” Or, for that matter, the New York Times: “…the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding and other techniques that critics say crossed the line into torture…”

Torture, as a word, except in documents or in the mouths of other people — those “critics” — has evidently lost its descriptive powers in our news world where almost any other formulation is preferred. Often these days the word of choice is “harsh,” or even “brutal,” both substitutes for the anodyne “enhanced” in the Bush administration’s own description of the package of torture “techniques” it institutionalized and justified after the fact in those legal memos. The phrase was, of course, meant to be law-evading, since torture is a crime, not just in international law, but in this country. The fact is that, if you can’t call something what it is, you’re going to have a tough time facing what you’ve done, no less prosecuting crimes committed not quite in its name.

What we call things, the names we use, matters. How, for instance, we imagine our past affects how we see the present and future, as Andrew Bacevich makes clear below. It’s little wonder that Bacevich’s book, The Limits of Power, became a bestseller. He has a way of hacking through the verbiage of our world, always heading for reality; he also has a way, as the Chinese used to put it, of “rectifying names” — that is, bringing reality and naming practices back into sync. Here, for instance, is how, at the end of Limits, he frames Washington’s consensus urge to respond to two failed wars and a failing global mission by expanding the U.S. military:

“America doesn’t need a bigger army. It needs a smaller — that is, more modest — foreign policy, one that assigns soldiers missions that are consistent with their capabilities. Modesty implies giving up on the illusions of grandeur to which the end of the Cold War and then 9/11 gave rise.”

Now, let him go to work in the same fashion on our truncated “American Century” (and catch a video of him discussing the subject as well). Tom