William Shakespeare wrote, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet."As the occupation of Iraq drags on, with no end in sight, things appear to be getting worse. The Iraqi insurgents, as they are being called, are getting more active and more ferocious. Americans are currently dying at a much greater rate than any time since the now infamous "mission accomplished" stunt.
The Republicans are particularly good at inventing names for their pet projects. The "Peacekeeper" was really an ICBM with multiple nuclear warheads. The "Contract with America" promised to accomplish exactly nothing, yet it gave them control of Congress. The "Defense of Marriage" act doesn't actually defend anything except the ability of one group to enforce their will upon another. The "U.S.A. Patriot Act" sounds like something nobody in this country could oppose, yet much of it is being declared unconstitutional -- in other words, "un-Patriotic".
So it comes as no surprise that the people who are opposing the American occupation of Iraq have been labeled as "insurgents". My dictionary (the "American College Dictionary") defines an insurgent as "one who rises in forcible opposition to lawful authority; one who engages in armed resistance to the government or to the execution of laws."
What government? What laws? What authority?
The people who are fighting against the Americans are trying to drive out an occupying force. There is no lawful authority in Iraq, only people appointed by the invaders. By the reasoning of the Bush administration and the lapdog media who have parroted their term, anyone in Kuwait who opposed Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion would have been labeled an "insurgent". According to the Bush administration, the French resistance movement in World War II consisted of nothing more than "insurgents".
Definitions aside (for a moment), sometimes insurgents can be good. After all, what were General Washington's troops in the American Revolution but a pack of insurgents?
So if the Iraqis who are fighting against the American occupiers aren't insurgents, what are they? We have to give them a name, if only so we all know what we're talking about. I humbly suggest a name that Republicans used for another group of "insurgents":
Freedom fighters.
Copyright 2004, Dan Jacoby
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