Discussion Groups / British English / May 2004

The war of the words

One of the chief problems with the current exciting
adventure in Iraq is that no one can agree on what
to call anyone else.
In the second world war we were fighting the Germans,
and the Germans were fighting us. Everyone agreed who
was fighting who. That's what a proper war is like.
However, in Iraq, there isn't even any agreement on what to
call the Americans. The Iraqis insist on calling them
"Americans", which seems, on the face of it, reasonable.
The Americans, however, insist on referring to themselves
as "coalition forces". This is probably the first time in history that
the United States has tried to share its military glory with someone else...

Then there's the problem of what the Americans are going
to call the Iraqis - especially the ones that they kill. You can call
people who are defending their own homes from rockets and
missiles launched from helicopters and tanks "fanatics and
terrorists" only for so long. Eventually even newspaper readers
will smell a rat.

Similarly it's fiendishly difficult to get people to accept the
label "rebels" for those Iraqis killed by American snipers
when - as in Falluja - they turn out to be pregnant women,
13-year-old boys and old men standing by their front gates.

It also sounds a bit lame to call ambulance drivers "fighters" -
when they've been shot through the windscreen in the act of
driving the wounded to hospital - and yet what other word
can you use without making them sound like illegitimate targets?
I hope you're beginning to see the problem.

The key thing, I suppose, is to try to call US mercenaries "civilians"
or "civilian contractors", while calling Iraqi civilians "fighters" or
"insurgents".
Describing the recent attack on Najaf, the New York Times
happily hit upon the word "militiamen". This has the advantage of
being a bit vague (nobody really knows what a "militiaman"
looks like or does), while at the same time sounding like the
sort of foreigners any responsible government ought to kill on sight.

However, the semantic problems in Iraq run even deeper than that.

For example, there's the "handover of power" that's due to take place
on June 30. Since no actual "power" is going to be handed over, the
coalition chaps have had to find a less conclusive phrase.
They now talk about the handover of "sovereignty", which is a suitably
elastic notion. And besides, handing over a "notion" is a damn sight
easier than handing over anything concrete.

Then again, the US insists that it has been carrying out "negotiations"
with the mojahedin in Falluja. These "negotiations" consist of the
US military demanding that the mojahedin hand over all their
rocket-propelled grenade launchers, in return for which the US
military will not blast the city to kingdom come. Now there's a
danger that this all sounds like one side "threatening" the other, rather
than "negotiations" - which, after all, usually implies some give
and take on both sides.

As for the word "ceasefire", it's difficult to know what this signifies
anymore. According to reliable witness reports from Falluja, the
new American usage makes generous allowance for dropping
cluster bombs and flares, and deploying artillery and snipers.

But perhaps the most exciting linguistic development is to be
found away from the areas of conflict - in the calm of the Oval
Office, where very few people get killed for looking out of their
windows. Here words such as "strategy" and "policy" are daily
applied to the kneejerk reactions of politicians and military
commanders who think that brute force is the only way to
resolve difficult problems in a delicate situation. As Major
Kevin Collins, one of the officers in charge of the marines
in Falluja, put it: "If you choose to pick a fight, we'll finish it."

In the past, one might have used a phrase such as "numbskull
stupidity" rather than "strategy". But then, language has a life
of its own ... which is more than one can say for a lot of
nnocent Iraqis. "

Terry Jones
Friday April 30, 2004
The Guardian

Full article at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1206691,00.html