Bush's War: A Glossary

What's in a word?

Surge for example.

As Henny Youngman would have said: Take this word, please!"

The policy is to send 21,500 more American soldiers to Vietnam, oops, Iraq, for an indefinite period. This move implies that if more troops are better now, even more troops may well be better in the future. This is opposite to reducing the number of troops. But surge has a nice, if illogical, temporary feel.

The more accurate word the Bush administration could have used was escalation. But that word, which was used quite honestly to describe the massively unsuccessful piecemeal addition of troops to Vietnam during the Lyndon Johnson era, is linguistically discredited and hence could not be used.

That failure, that lost war, led to the Colin Powell doctrine during the first Gulf War: build an enormous force in the region prior to any invasion in order to guarantee victory. There would be no more gradual increase of troops. The whole shooting match would go off at once.

Rummy's lingo

Donald Rumsfeld, a Great Thinker, wanted to demonstrate in Iraq and future wars that, given the incredibly sophisticated means of war at their disposal, the American armed forces could go in with relatively small numbers of troops, linked to massive air power, to shock and awe the pathetic armed forces of Iraq or other threatening third world theatres, into paralysis and defeat.

He got that right, but he did not consider that massive number of troops would be needed to maintain effective control of Iraq after the easy military victory.

And he and his boss would never admit this absolutely fundamental error as the war ground on, and therefore they did not escalate. To the contrary, for them the situation was always improving. Of course they never said that they saw the light at the end of the tunnel as had Lyndon Johnson, but their conception of the struggle was exactly that.

Now, even with the Great Thinker gone, George W. Bush has rejected the alternative analysis of his own commission of senior experts that the war be wound down and a political withdrawal be effected including negotiations that would include Syria and Iran. For Bush Iran is part of the axis of evil, and Syria a sort of honourary member of the axis. With such enemies, no diplomacy is possible; one should not even imagine an alternative and no wider political context for negotiating an end to the war that would legitimate enemies.

Negotiation is unthinkable, only victory, whatever that might be, is thinkable.

Hence the "surge."

'Liberate' your mind

Obviously, the linguistic front is ideologically crucial in defining the terms by which the American public is conditioned to conceptualize the war in Iraq. Yet on the whole the administration has been allowed to define terms, however phony. It is appalling that most of the press has simply accepted the blatant euphemism surge, without thoroughly questioning the implications of escalation.

But then again, few had challenged another long-used Bush administration semantic evasion -- insurgency. Insurgents are outlaws rebelling illegally against an established government. What we have in Iraq is a mostly fictive central government and a civil war fought by competing guerrilla militias, the armed wings of ethnic factions. But the Bush administration denies there is a civil war at hand, and they are aided in this denial by the media acceptance of the term insurgency, and general agreement not to call a civil war a civil war.

Also, we must remember that the American leadership never actually invaded Iraq, they liberated it. They brought freedom, not imperialism. Nor can I recall that they have ever defined themselves as an occupation force. That would sound permanent. And they sought to free the naturally democratic potential of Iraq. (Actually they have given up on this one, now admitting they would settle for some sort of stable regime—not that one is on the horizon.)

They saw Iraq as a nation, which it is not, either ethnically or historically. Iraq was a British colonial fiction, created out of parts of the Turkish Empire after WW I. It is a collection of warring tribes and clans, with no national traditions or culture. It had been held together only by a brutal dictatorship. It is not a nation.

Simply evil

And this invasion is, particularly according to Dick Cheney, the other Great Thinker of the Bush administration, but one phase of a larger policy the War on Terror, the grand daddy of ideological newspeak—and the one least challenged conceptually in the press or by opposition political actors. Thus follows Cheney's mantra that any criticism gives aid and comfort to Bin Ladin—the maximum leader of the enemy side of this war. As if the Americans were fighting a cohesive enemy force! And this is a "war" without temporal or spatial dimension—it is everywhere and it is permanent. Any measure of suppression of liberty at home in the name of security is justified as part of this great struggle between the forces of good and evil.

You don't have to be Noam Chomsky to note this linguistic thuggery. And I am certain that every imperialist nation has had its equivalents ever since imposed pax Romana.

One final word -- this one from the anti-imperialist side. As nearly as I can discern, it was Mark Twain who first applied the word quagmire to an American imperialist war --the invasion of the Philippines at the turn of the Twentieth Century. The antiwar movement made that term stick in Vietnam, but so far not concerning Iraq. Invasion, imperialism, occupation, civil war, quagmire -- that is the alternative linguistic conceptualization of the Iraq War.

So is defeat -- unthinkable to the current administration and highly unpalatable to the American people.

Related Tyee stories:

• What If Canada Had Gone to Iraq?
• 'American Zeitgest' Top Iraq Documentary
• Oh Sh%#!!: Oh Sh%#!!: Iraq, the climate, and the big reckoning