Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the United States has fought two very long, very costly and, in the end, not very successful wars. Barack Obama was elected president in no small part because he promised to bind up the nation’s wounds and withdraw its troops. Yet the enemy, in the forms of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, remains and must be confronted, in part, the Obama administration believes, by the American military. The president has struggled to find a language that distinguishes between force, which most Americans want, and war, which they don’t. He and his team have therefore promised, vowed, pledged that, come what may, they will not use ‘‘boots on the ground.’’

In late October, when Obama announced that he was sending up to 50 Special Operations troops to Syria to work with Kurdish and Arab soldiers fighting ISIS, many reporters asked whether he had violated an earlier promise not to put boots on the ground. Not at all, said the White House spokesman Josh Earnest. The president made that earlier commitment in order to reassure Americans that he would not ‘‘implement a military strategy to take down Bashar al-Assad,’’ the Syrian president. He does not ‘‘contemplate a large-scale, long-term ground-combat operation.’’ Obama himself answered a ‘‘boots on the ground’’ question by explaining: ‘‘We are not putting U.S. troops on the front lines fighting firefights with ISIL.’’

It is true that neither the several dozen soldiers in Syria nor the 3,000 in Iraq — nor, for that matter, the 10,000 now in Afghanistan — constitute a ‘‘long-term ground-combat operation.’’ That, however, is not the answer to the question that was asked. Obama and his team have turned to linguistic legerdemain to insist that they are not doing what they are, in fact, doing, which is putting soldiers in harm’s way. They have offered the textbook illustration of George Orwell’s observation, in his essay ‘‘Politics and the English Language,’’ that the euphemistic phrases of political discourse often serve not to disguise outright falsehood but rather to dress up objectives ‘‘too brutal for most people to face.’’

Before it was weaponized for purposes of political debate, as a recent article in The Atlantic noted, ‘‘boots on the ground’’ served as a self-evident expression signifying that soldiers were present in a combat setting. William Safire once traced the phrase to a 1980 article in The Christian Science Monitor in which a general, speaking of a possible rescue operation to retrieve the American hostages then held in Iran, argued that ‘‘getting U.S. boots on the ground’’ sent a signal to potential adversaries that the United States was prepared for war. A pair of dust-caked boots conjures up the men (and women) who wear them, the weapons they carry, the danger they face. Innumerable book titles, like Karl Zinsmeister’s ‘‘Boots on the Ground: A Month With the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq,’’ exploit this imagery.