Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

The term is everywhere and has been hurried into the leading European languages without waiting for translation: "shock and awe". At the outset of the war, some commentators here on German TV rendered it as "Shock und Schreck (fright)", possibly drawing upon the German saying "die Schrecken des Krieges (the horrors of war), but they've given up now and use the original English term instead.

Did Harlan Ullman realise how ubiquitous the expression would become when he co-authored "Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance" in 1996? The book is out of print, by the way, but here's an entire HTML version courtesy of its publishers, NDU Press.

Ullman, now a senior associate of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies contributes an article called "Shock and awe and a clash of cultures" to today's Comment & Analysis section of the Financial Times. The first thing that strikes the reader is that the piece must have been written before yesterday's sobering events at Nassiriya. Who at the FT sub-editing desk allowed this to get through?

"Both the US public and its government can see that the war is going exceedingly well so far. The Iraqi army and Mr Hussein's regime have been stunned and rocked by the terrifying array of US super-technology and weapons. Ground forces are driving towards Baghdad. Special Forces are believed to have seized critical airheads, bridges and other important objectives. The air war against Baghdad offers the most visible image of the way the war has been conducted."

And then there's this sentence:

"Indeed, the overwhelming strength of US arms and the relative absence of organised resistance are interpreted as the local tough beating up a defenceless and puny victim."

It's hard to continue reading an article when the argument has been overtaken by events. Even Ullman's closing paragraph sounds at odds with reality because we now know that victory will not be "quick and cheap". For what it's worth, here's the ending:

"President George W. Bush has bet more than his presidency on this war. He has bet the nation. Even if shock and awe prevail and the victory is quick and cheap, that is only the first phase in a much longer campaign to bring justice and stability to a region infested with the most virulent forms of violence and hatred the world has known."

With news from the battlefield pouring in, the FT editors are under enormous pressure to keep things in perspective but there's no excuse for allowing feeble stuff like this onto the Comment & Analysis pages.