LONDON, 1 May 2004 — 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 World War II 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.
Hollywood, for example, is forever telling us it was the Americans who won World War II. It was an American who led the break-out from the prison camp Stalag Luft III in The Great Escape; the Americans who captured the Enigma machine in the film U571; and Tom Cruise who single-handedly won the Battle of Britain (in his latest project, The Few).
So I suppose it’s reassuring to find the US generals in Iraq so keen to emphasize the role played by America’s partners in bringing a better way of life to Iraq.
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 Fallujah — 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 , 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 mujahedeen in Fallujah. These “negotiations” consist of the US military demanding that the mujahedeen 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 “cease-fire”, it’s difficult to know what this signifies anymore. According to reliable witness reports from Fallujah, 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 Maj. Kevin Collins, one of the officers in charge of the Marines in Fallujah, 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 innocent Iraqis.
— Terry Jones is a writer, film director, and actor.
