Anybody with even a smattering of learning knows that camouflage of the optical variety is the art of making something look like something else or making whatever something is doing look like it isn't.
Crazy painting of ships during wartime disguises their shape, size and direction of travel. An early example of successful disguise in wartime was the Trojan horse. It couldn't have been easy for a group of unwashed and odoriferous Greek warriors to be confined in silence inside a big wooden horse until some lame-brained Trojan decided to take the horse through the main gate of Troy and park it in the city square overnight. When the horse spilled its guts, so to speak, the walls were breached and the city fell. Helen, the daughter of the god Zeus and Leda, who met him when he was pretending to be a swan, was also the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta. She eloped with Paris of Troy. Greeks from all over the Peloponnesus sailed to Troy under Menelaus' command to get her back. This is why it is said that Helen had a "face which launched a thousand ships."
Let's get real. Neither playboy Paris nor any of the incipient wife-stealers among her rescuers were just looking at her face. The Trojan War was about a beautiful sex-pot. To give the ancient Greeks their due, I think fighting for a beautiful woman makes more sense than fighting for reasons somebody in the halls of power just made up.
Among the optical disguises of warfare are "Quakers." In the age of fighting sail, these were wooden cannons placed on lightly armed vessels to make them appear much more formidable. In the Second World War, photo reconnaissance showed many anti-aircraft guns ringing Dresden. Some of them were wooden fakes. These are the tricks of warfare. Far more insidious is the conversational camouflage that is used to make wars happen.
In 1900, Britain was at war with the Boer republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The conversational camouflage in the British Parliament and newspapers was about the necessity of protecting the Uitanders (Outlanders) in the two Boer states. An outlander was an immigrant of non-Dutch descent. It was an argument over immigration policy. There was also some pious concern expressed over the Boers' mistreatment of their Kaffir servants, Kaffir being a black person of any tribe. To understand the difference between reality and wordy camouflage, only one question need be asked. Who profited? Certainly, it was not the dead. Almost 30,000 combatants were killed and as many as 28,000 women and children died in British concentration camps. Nor was it the Kaffirs who were killed; nobody bothered to count them. Nor was it the taxpayers on both sides who financed the war. The inescapable conclusion is that the profits of the war went to arms merchants and the people who took control of Transvaal's gold and diamond mines.
Canada is now a part of a bloc of nations that is fighting a war against terrorists. The camouflage is "peace, freedom and democracy." We are led by powerful people with powerful intellects. Are they really so naïve that they think the solution for terrorism can be found in force of arms, in populations learning the virtues of peace freedom and democracy when they have little past history of any of them? Do they really believe there will be full equality for women in societies where religion has made women into chattels for centuries? We can see who is profiting now - arms merchants, war lords, drug dealers. If honest historians survive for another century, they may discover who else enjoyed the benefits of the War on Terror.
