"Insurgents" - Safire

On Language: Mideastisms
By WILLIAM SAFIRE | the New York Times | January 15, 2006

"We frequently call them insurgents," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a news conference late last year. "I'm a little reluctant to, for some reason. They're against a legitimate government."

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at Rumsfeld's side, told the reporters that U.S., Iraqi and coalition forces were "taking cities from the - I have to use the word 'insurgent' because I can't think of a better word right now.. . ." Rumsfeld quickly put in, "Enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government - how's that?"

Insurgent, from the Latin insurgere, "to rise up," means "a rebel, one who revolts against an established government." The insurgent in rebellion does not have the status of a belligerent, rooted in Latin for "waging war," and thus does not have the protections in law of a member of a state at war. Why, then, was Rumsfeld eager to get away from the term insurgent? One reason, I think, is that the word has gained more of a political connotation than a legal one in the U.S.; it is often applied to a group seeking to oust the leadership of a political party or a union, and insurgents in that context can refer to admirable "underdogs" in a struggle against the established order or entrenched leadership. Another reason: it unifies disparate elements into an "insurgency."

The day after that news conference, President Bush delivered a speech to the Naval Academy defining the enemy in Iraq as "a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists and terrorists." Gone was insurgents; in addition, a previous category of "Saddam loyalists" was shortened to Saddamists because loyalty, even to a tyrant, can be seen as an attribute. In the Bush lexicon, rejectionists are mainly resentful Sunnis who can be brought into the Iraqi democratic fold; Saddamists are the tyrant's favorites "who still harbor dreams of returning to power"; and terrorists, a term from the French Revolution, are Al Qaeda "foreigners who are coming to fight freedom's progress in Iraq."

By refusing to accept the lumping of the three disparate groups into an insurgency, the Bush administration hopes to publicly separate the most violent factions from the more reachable current rejectionists.

In wartime, words are weapons; we have seen how Israelis and Palestinians are highly sensitive to connotations in their conflict. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon preferred to refer to land in dispute west of the Jordan River by biblical names: Judea and Samaria, evoking Hebrew origins; Israeli diplomats long tried "administered territories." Palestinians call it the West Bank and have won that terminological battle.

On another word-war front, the construction within the West Bank to protect Israelis from rocket attacks and penetration by suicide bombers is called "the wall" by Palestinians intending to evoke memories of the cold war's hated Berlin Wall. Israelis counter by calling it "the fence," a less onerous and more familiar description of a line of separation, recalling to Americans the Robert Frost poetic line "Good fences make good neighbors." (In fact, it is both fence and wall, depending on the place.) After perusal of thesauri, the Bush administration adopted the undeniably accurate word barrier, which has been accepted as neutral by much of the news media and stirs no objection by Israel....