The Iraq War of Bad Terminology
Courtesy of The Axis of Evel Knievel and the on-going wonder that is the Carnival of Bad History, I share with you something that has kept me laughing for some time. It involves the ever-laughable linguistic challenges related to the current President. When not mangling the English language himself, he orders his subordinates to so twist and torture the language that it is no longer mere propoganda, but more like abughraiboganda.
Here is a choice excerpt. I’ve been laughing my ass off for weeks now, because of something I saw on Fox News. With their usual oafish delivery of spittal, a Fox News mouthpiece called the Iraq Civil War, “snowballing sectarian violence.” This was after Tony Snow rejected public calls to use the “civil war” label, choosing instead “sectarian violence operations.” So the choice wording of “snowballing” just cracked me up.
Jon Swift (great name, eh?) captured Snow’s complete quotes and nuanced meanings in this paragraph:
The White House understandably has been very resistant to referring to the War in Iraq as a civil war. Although Webster’s dictionary, which has a well-known liberal bias, defines “civil war” as “a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country,” clearly this definition misses the nuances of what really constitutes a civil war. As Tony Snow pointed out, the situation in Iraq doesn’t even come close to being a civil war according to those who really know about these sorts of things. “I think the general notion is a civil war is when you have people who, to use the American Civil War or other civil wars as an example, where people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy within Iran [sic],” he explained patiently to the thick-headed members of the press during a recent news conference, apparently getting ahead of himself a little by referring to the upcoming war in Iran instead of Iraq. “At this point, you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that they are operating as a unified force. You don’t have a clearly identifiable leader. And so in this particular case, no. What you do have is a number of different groups — you know, they’ve been described in some cases as rejectionists, in others as terrorists. In many cases, they are not groups that would naturally get along, either, but they severally and together pose a threat to the government.” I don’t think anyone can put it more clearly than that.
Now that you understand the background of my cackling, here is a Bad Terminology excerpt from AEK: Carnival of Bad History #12:
At Jon Swift’s blog, the question of “civil war” receives its proper illumination:
So taking a page from Tony Snow’s book I propose calling it the Iraq War of Terrorists and Rejectionists Not Operating as a Unified Force and Without a Clearly Identifiable Leader Who Severally and Together Pose a Threat to the Government Through Sectarian Violence Operations.