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William Shakespeare once asked What's in a name? That
which we call a rose by any other name would smell as
sweet.
And it's true that the thorny bushes hereabouts
would provide pleasant May aromas no matter whether we
called them Rosa neomexicana, Rosa woodsii, or just plain
old wild roses.
But nomenclature does matter in other contexts. Why else
would our Republican propagandists work so hard at turning
the estate tax
into the death tax?
At defying
the normal rules for adjectival suffixes to produce the
Democrat Party
instead of the Democratic
Party?
Even though President George W. Bush can appear to be
linguistically challenged sometimes, he knows his business
in this regard, and so he refrains from referring to the
conflicts in Iraq as a civil war.
At first, I figured he was just playing to his political
base on the nether side of the Mason-Dixon line, where they
don't cotton to the phrase civil war
and prefer
the war between the states
or the war of the
rebellion.
Using civil war,
even in reference to
a conflict in a different century on a different continent,
might imply that this President from Texas has sold out to
the Yankees.
But further reading disclosed that White House spin
doctors fear that American support for the conflict would
wane if we saw it as a contention between Iraqi factions,
rather than as an important front in the Global War on
Terror. Thus the administration has been perturbed by the
decision of NBC and other news organizations to call it a
civil war.
Along that line, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow
last week said civil war
was incorrect because there
are not two clearly defined and opposing groups vying
not only for power but for territory.
Following that line, the Colorado Springs Gazette, a
daily publication that superficially resembles a newspaper,
has been removing civil war
from wire-service
dispatches from Iraq. Apparently, its editors avoid terms
that have not received White House approval.
Granted, the Iraq conflict isn't the Cavaliers
contesting with the Roundheads for control of England in
1650, or the Zapatistas and Federales contending for
control of Mexico in 1913. It looks more like what some
might call anarchy
-- that is, no rule of law
because there is no effective government.
We need to call it something, but what? This isn't the
first dispute about what to call whatever it is in Iraq.
Remember Georgia Sen. Zell Miller at the Republican
convention in 2004, ranting about the word
occupation
in connection with Iraq, even though it
was a term that Bush himself had used on several
occasions.
Of all the terms I've encountered, I prefer Bush War
II
for the current conflict in the Persian Gulf. It
assigns responsibility fairly while providing a historical
context. It won't ever catch on, of course, but neither
will Operation Baghdad Cakewalk
or the effort to
find Weapons of Mass Destruction that were not in Iraq
or Pursuit of Al Qaeda in a country where it did not
operate until after we got there.
The name that will endure will be determined in time by
the public, and that will vary. We call it the Vietnam War
while the Vietnamese refer to the American War. Sometimes I
read of the Korean War and other times of the Korean
Conflict, and I have relatives who call it Truman's War. No
one calls it a police action,
which is what
President Harry S. Truman called it.
My grandfather talked of service in France during the
Great War,
which President Woodrow Wilson called
the war to end all wars.
It became World War
I
after the christening of World War II,
a name
which displeased President Franklin D. Roosevelt; he
preferred the Tyrants' War.
History shows that our presidents haven't had much
influence on what we call our wars. But the eventual name,
whatever it is, will probably not be as accurate as the
war that was much easier to get into than out of.
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