As was the case during the Persian Gulf war, the NATO war against Yugoslavia witnessed a collapse of mainstream media integrity and a new surge of doublespeak in the service of the war party. It was grimly humorous that NATO and its compliant media partners justified the bombing of Serbian radio and TV on the grounds of propaganda service to Milosevic's war machine. Let me briefly review here a short-list of purr and snarl words that have been of outstanding service to U.S. and British propaganda.
Credibility is a purr word, that oozes goodness.
Hawks always resort to credibility as a form of flag-waving, using it to make compromise or withdrawal a form of moral and unpatriotic defeat. But it is an appeal to irrationality and assures that a mistake can be transformed into a catastrophe. The media have been extremely lax in giving uncontested space to Senator John McCain and Zbigniew Brzezinski to play the credibility gambit and failing to look behind this purr word to the real issues at stake. And they have thereby allowed it to serve as an instrument of war propaganda. Humanitarian is a purr word, but humanitarian bombing is an oxymoron, blending the warm-hearted with dealing death.