What’s the difference between “boots on the ground” and military personnel
wearing boots who are engaged in combat – and perhaps dying – on the ground?
If you can answer that question convincingly, perhaps you’d like to apply for
John Kirby’s job, because he’s not doing it very successfully. Kirby is the
State Department spokesman who, in answer to a question from a reporter about
the 250 US troops being sent to Syria, denied President Obama ever said there’d
be “no boots on the ground” in Syria. Here’s the video,
and here’s the relevant transcript:
“Kirby: there was never this – there was never this, “No boots on the ground.”
I don’t know where this keeps coming from.
Question: But yes there
– well, yes, yes, there was.
Kirby: There was no
– there was – no there wasn’t. There was –
Question: More than
–
Question: What?
Kirby: We’re not going
to be involved in a large-scale combat mission on the ground. That is what the
President has long said.”
To anyone who has been following this, Kirby’s argument
is patently absurd. The President told the BBC less than twenty-four
hours previously that there would be “no boots on the ground” – and then
his administration announced that 250 more booted US soldiers would be treading
Syrian ground. Not only that, but prior to the summer of last year, the President
assured the American people there’d be no “boots on the ground” a total of
sixteen
times.
As George Orwell dramatized in Nineteen Eighty-Four,
and also in this
memorable essay, the degeneration of language into an instrument of concealment
is one of the hallmarks of the modern age. In the novel, there is a vast apparatus
concerned solely with erasing the past in order to justify the actions of the
present: the Obama administration doesn’t have the power to do that, and yet
thinks it can achieve the same ends by simply denying what everyone knows to
be true, as shown by Kirby’s surreal exchange with reporters:
“Question: The point is is that for months and months and months that the
mantra from the President and everyone else in the Administration has been,
‘No boots on the ground’ and now –
“Kirby: No, that is
not true.
Question: What?
Kirby: It’s just not
true, Matt.
Question: It is.
Question: Mr. Kirby –
Kirby: It’s just not
true.
Question: It’s true.
Kirby: No, it’s not.
I just flatly, absolutely disagree with you …”