For days warlike sounds have issued from Washington about the need for a ''surgical strike'' to ''take out'' that troublesome chemical plant in Libya. This fast-food and medical jargon harks back to Vietnam days when it was used to describe what our air forces were up to, which was bombing with a ferocity somewhat less destructive than nuclear assault.
The surgicality of these raids was constantly insisted upon by our military media manipulators, with the implication that there is little difference between having your appendix removed and standing in a rice field with B-52's dumping bombs on you.
This antiseptic English was revived this week by Pentagon reporters as the Government turned up the volume on threats to attack Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi's chemical plant. When masses of news people start using the same Pentagon euphemisms, you can bet they are not inventing their own cliches but amplifying a melody the Government wants lodged in the public ear.
In this case, Government broadcasting began when President Reagan blurted out that the U.S., which has already bombed Colonel Qaddafi once before, might have to do it again.
Why would the United States do that to Colonel Qaddafi, aside from the facts that he gives aid and comfort to terrorists and that he also gives President Reagan a pain in the neck? Because his new chemical plant, says Washington, can make chemical weapons, no matter that the colonel insists its sole purpose is to produce life-enhancing pharmaceuticals.
Who can penetrate the subtleties of the Washington mind when it comes to grips with the maddening Qaddafi psyche? Does the U.S. really intend to blast the colonel unless he says ''uncle''?
Or is it merely trying to agitate its European allies, who enjoy profitable business relationships with Qaddafi, who think the U.S. is hopelessly neurotic about him and who wish Washington would get off his back?
If Washington's surgical-strike talk could persuade some of Qaddafi's good European trading partners to stop helping him build troublesome factories; or if they could be moved to speak to him like a Dutch, or preferably a German, uncle . . .
''Now, Muammar, you know how sensitive these silly Americans can be about trifles, and what is a pharmaceutical plant, after all? Just a few billion more aspirins to interrupt the television news. Why not be a good fellow and allow full-time inspections . . .?''
Well, the only thing more inscrutable than the Occidental mind is the California variant of it that has developed in Washington. So who can explain why the Pentagon, after crying ''Take out!'' and ''Surgical strike!'' was shocked to find Libyan fighter planes acting bellicose when our planes showed up in the neighborhood?
I have been to Air Force shows where those fantastically expensive planes come right at you faster than speeding bullets, and though I knew they were on my side I felt myself go white inside and out. It is unlikely that the thought of such a moment could make Colonel Qaddafi feel anything but extremely nervous.
Is it reasonable to suppose that, after so much ''take-out'' talk in Washington, two of Qaddafi's military planes encountering two American warplanes might conclude that they were the vanguard of the promised surgical strike and do something foolish?
Whatever the explanation, something foolish was done in the Mediterranean sky and Libyan planes were destroyed. They did not, apparently, carry foolishness to the point of firing at our planes, but the Pentagon insists they were armed and could have.
Can we really tell that for sure? One wants to believe our side, but if we believed the Pentagon's first account of the Navy's shooting down the Iranian airliner last year, we ended up dead wrong.
Other unanswerable questions abound. For instance, if small nations making chemical weapons are so intolerable, why aren't we considering a ''surgical strike'' in Iraq, the one nation that has already used chemical warfare on a mass scale?
For instance too, why is it that the genial Gipper, who seems capable of liking almost everybody everywhere in the world, including ex-evil empire Sovietskis, gnashes his teeth and sees red whenever he has to deal with two small-bore dictators? Namely, Qaddafi and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua.
Besides small-bore, they also probably rank Number Two and Number Three among the world's most theatrical leaders. Is there a little mutual dislike among show biz performers involved here?