Was ever a president in a more ticklish semantic situation? American and allied planes have just wiped out a Gadhafi column heading for Benghazi. If ever a military action deserved the name "surgical strike" this one did. It was precise, limited, clean, and expertly done. Yet the Obama administration couldn't call it a "surgical strike" because that was Lyndon Johnson's expression for the first actions that sucked us into Viet Nam. Use of it would provoke the here-we-go-again response.
The same is probably true of "evil." Obama can't use it because it was George W. Bush's high-suction word for the "axis" Iraq was said to be part of. No careful speechwriter wants to remind the left and middle of the right's play (with a "more theological" word than "hatred") for evangelical support. So there goes that one, no matter what awful thing Gadhafi does.
The expression "protecting civilians," used to describe the aim of the whole operation (Odyssey Dawn), comes with none of that earlier baggage but already it's causing trouble. It covered what, according to the Associated Press, we were doing in that strike, "preventing Moammar Gadhafi's forces from inflicting more violence on civilians — particularly in and around the rebel stronghold of Benghazi." Trying to picture civilians who weren't rebels and rebels who weren't civilians and locate them all with respect to the stronghold was too much even for the straight-faced NBC reporter.
You can find a word a casualty-wary public will accept but it's so hard to keep from stretching it. The other aim of Odyssey Dawn was to "degrade the Libyan military's ability to contest a no-fly zone." For the Benghazi strike you had to stretch the acceptable "no-fly" to "no-drive." If you didn't you had something like "tanks caught taxiing toward rebel stronghold." You could tell by the reporter's face that this line wouldn't hold for long, at least among the verbally sophisticated.
Does the reaction of the sophisticated, the reporters and the pundits and the professors, matter much? It's the voting masses (meaning only those so busy making a living they don't have time for careful examination) who in the end determine military action. If suffering humanity is to be relieved, and these words work on those masses to relieve it, what case do we have for a sophisticated view?
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