winston churchill once said: <"Operations in which large numbers of men may lose their lives ought not to be described by code words which imply a boastful or overconfident sentiment."> -------- GOVERNMENT TRIPPING OVER RELIGIOUS RHETORIC=BY SARAH LUBMAN SJMercury News For the second time in less than a week, the U.S. government had damage control to do because of its religion-infused rhetoric. The Pentagon on Thursday backed away from the code name for its anti-terrorist offensive, ``Operation Infinite Justice,'' for fear of offending Muslims. /.../ Objections to ``Infinite Justice'' came up at a Pentagon briefing on Thursday. A reporter told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that several Islamic scholars took issue with the term, saying that infinite justice resides only with God, or Allah. /.../ The American military, following German practice, began naming its military operations during World War II. In 1942, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved an index of code words that are randomly assigned for each operation. The first word refers to the operation's region -- e.g., ``desert'' for the Middle East -- and the second often connotes some kind of resolve. Winston Churchill was fascinated with code names and had his own thoughts on the matter, according to a 1995 article on the history of naming operations in Parameters, a U.S. Army War College quarterly. Churchill instructed that operation names shouldn't be silly: They should not ``enable some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called `Bunnyhug' or `Ballyhoo.' '' /.../ http://www0.mercurycenter.com/partners/docs/003925.htm Posted at 11:03 p.m. PDT Thursday, Sept. 20, 2001