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.
Even though President George W. Bush can appear to be linguistically challenged sometimes, he knows his business regarding political language, 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 some 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 The Gazette in Colorado Springs has been removing “civil war” from wire-service dispatches from Iraq.
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.”
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 several times.
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.”
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
