Safire: Language, the words of war

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Language: The words of war

William Safire The New York Times
MONDAY, APRIL 10, 2006
 WASHINGTON

Sectarian is a word long associated with religion that has a nastier
connotation than its synonym denominational. The latest Oxford English
Dictionary research puts the first use of the term in 1583 in Stephen
Batman's "Golden Booke of the Leaden Goddess": "A Recapitulation of the
Sectarian Gods, by whose Heresies, much harme hath growen, to Gods true
Church." Within Islam, fundamentalist Sunnis consider Shiism to be a
heretical sect. In February 2004, a courier was intercepted by Kurds as he
was reportedly carrying a message from the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi to his leader in Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden. The letter laid out
a strategy to inflame Sunnis in Iraq by murdering Shiites and thereby
provoking them to counterattack Sunnis: "If we succeed in dragging them
into the arena of sectarian war," wrote Zarqawi about the Shiites,
according to the English translation, "it will become possible to awaken
the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger." As the number of
Iraqi civilian deaths mounted in terrorist-fomented fighting between
Sunnis and Shiites, sectarian was more frequently used:  The New York
Times reported that Bush officials were complaining that "the news media's
focus on bombings and sectarian violence had given a skewed view of the
progress being made in Iraq."

To avoid using the same phrase in successive sentences, an Associated
Press dispatch from Dubai last month equated sectarian violence with
ethnic clashes. That's not precise; ethnic strife would be predominantly
between ethnic groups, like Arabs and Kurds (both mainly professing the
Sunni branch of the faith), or between ethnic Persians in Iran and Arabs
in Iraq (both Shiite). When the violence is within one religious group,
like the Arab Shiites and Arab Sunnis, both Muslim, it is properly called
sectarian violence. "When people of different ethnicities, religions or
sects fight each other locally and spontaneously, with no organization,"
says Edward Luttwak, author of The Dictionary of Modern War, "the correct
term is communal fighting. When organized groups - political, ethnic,
religious, it doesn't matter - fight within the recognized borders of a
single country, the correct term is civil war, even if there are many
groups and no central direction, so long as the groups are pursuing
political projects, such as the re-establishment of Sunni supremacy.
Otherwise, they would be just criminal gangs." Here is where political
views affect political terminology. President George W. Bush's view is
that terrorists from both outside and inside Iraq - criminal gangs allied
with Saddam loyalists hiding from prosecution - are seeking unsuccessfully
to foment civil war. Because the largest group in Iraq - roughly
three-quarters of the population - is Arab Muslim, the Zarqawi plan is to
use sectarian violence between Arab Shiites and the smaller segment, Arab
Sunnis, as the trigger for all-out civil war, with the non-Arab Kurds -
Sunni, but largely secular - joining in.

Success for Zarqawi - and a major setback for U.S. policy - would be a
widening of sectarian violence into civil war. Success for the coalition
forces - and a major setback for the terrorist-insurgent forces - would be
the prevention of that violence from escalating into civil war. Critics of
the Bush policy and opponents of the current elected government in Iraq
are using the term civil war to show that the military campaign is in deep
trouble. Ayad Allawi, an Iraqi leader who did not fare well in the
elections, told the BBC, "If this is not civil war, then God knows what
civil war is." The Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid argued that the
policy had "left Iraq on the precipice of all-out civil war." The
Republican senator Chuck Hagel, often described as "a frequent
administration critic," also used a qualifier: "a low-grade civil war."

Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution shows how the linguistic
battle lines are drawn: "'Iraq is now at civil war' means 'we have already
lost the battle and we should get out now'; 'Iraq is now experiencing
sectarian violence' means 'Iraq's natural propensity is toward civil war,
but thank God for the presence of American forces that are preventing
it.'" War-namers, stand down: What was euphemized after the U.S. Civil War
as "the late unpleasantness" will not get a name until it's over.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/04/09/news/edsafire.php