Decoding the U.S. war of words on Iraq - by Bruce Reed at Slate.com

[applegrove]

Decoding the U.S. war of words on Iraq

obfuscation | Sending more troops is a `surge,' say Republicans on Bush's Iraq plans. No, the Democrats say, it's a euphemism for escalation. Nobody in Washington is will just call a spade a spade

January 14, 2007
Bruce Reed
Slate.com

Despite U.S. voters' best efforts in November, the Bush administration didn't get the memo about finding common ground. The gulf between the president and everyone else couldn't be wider: For the Democratic Congress, success means passing the Hundred Hours' Agenda; for a Republican White House, the spread to beat is the Hundred Years' War.

At times, Democrats and Republicans sound like Americans and Brits – two peoples divided by a common language. To be sure, it has never been clear just what dialect George Bush is speaking – but whatever it is, Democrats are determined to speak something else.

The first great battle of the word wars broke out last week between "surge" and "escalation." So far, the semantic skirmish mirrors the real war it is trying to affect: nobody's winning.

Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, a leading architect of the surge, helped put the word on the map in the Weekly Standard in late November. A week earlier, Kagan and Bill Kristol had called for a "heavier footprint" in Iraq, in a piece that made no mention of surge. In Kagan's second piece, the footprints were gone. Instead, he mentioned surge a dozen times – twice in quotation marks, 10 times without.

.........SNIP"

http://www.thestar.com/article/170908