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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lurqer who wrote (41174)	4/3/2004 7:31:10 AM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

A War of Semantics Reggie Rivers It's impolitic to mention any similarity between U.S. leaders and terrorists, because we don't think of ourselves in those terms. Sure, our strategic objectives sometimes compel us to support terrorists, brutal regimes and dictatorial rule, but we are not terrorists ourselves. We're Americans, and I believe most of us truly believe in the ideas of democracy, justice and freedom. So we accept the premise that our troops are sent into legitimate warfare for legitimate reasons against legitimate enemies. Our leaders profess to have solid intelligence, professional soldiers and smart weapons, which allow them to hit the right targets and minimize collateral damage. But how do we know how accurately our information, weaponry and personnel perform on the battlefield? We're learning that our intelligence community missed evidence pointing to al-Qaeda's Sept. 11 attacks. Faulty intelligence led us into a war with Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that apparently don't exist, and despite our best efforts, Osama bin Laden is still at large. Yet, we accept without question the assertion that the intelligence guiding our weapons is rock solid. But how much faith should we have? We know that almost 600 American soldiers have died and more than 3,400 have been injured since the start of the war in Iraq, but our leaders have purposely not counted Iraqi troop and civilian deaths. If those casualty rates were known, what would we learn? It's possible that a low Iraqi body count would confirm that our weapons are every bit as accurate as advertised, but it seems likely that the Bush administration doesn't want to count the enemy dead because it would paint an unflattering picture of the battlefield. When we ignore local authorities, fly a drone into a sovereign nation, fire a missile and blow up a car carrying an alleged terrorist, as we did in Yemen a few months ago, where do we get the authority to conduct this mission in someone else's country, and how do we know it was the right car? The blast destroyed any opportunity to investigate after the fact. If we're learning anything, it's that the line between legitimate warfare and terrorism is sometimes extremely thin. Our media try to make the landscape clearer by adopting vernacular that paints our side with a brush of valor and the enemy with the stain of illegitimacy. Our troops are called "soldiers," but people fighting on the other side are "insurgents." This distinction quickly establishes that "soldiers" engage in legitimate warfare while "insurgents" engage in terrorism. In the beginning of the war, we heard about "air strikes" when our missiles hit Iraqi targets. When the enemy fired back at us, the media called the missiles "potshots." These days, when we kill them, we conduct "raids" and have "easy" battles, but when they kill us, they do so by "ambush" in "deadly" battles. When we aim our weapons at them, we "fire, hit or shoot," but when they aim at us, they "spray, strafe or gun down." "Shock and awe" produced "compelling" images of bombs raining on Baghdad and Iraqi soldiers surrendering; "terrifying and chaotic" battles produced "grim" images of American prisoners of war. It was a "violation of the Geneva Convention" when they paraded American POWs on TV, but not when we did the same with Saddam Hussein. Despite the best efforts of war reporters to shape our view of the battlefield, it seems clear that leaders on both sides are motivated by the same set of beliefs. They apparently believe that if they kill enough of us, we'll pack up and go home. Isn't that what we believe, too? Like them, we believe force is the only way to accomplish anything in this battle, and that we need only kill enough people in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere to dissuade the terrorists from messing with us. This line of thought will produce many losers but few winners. denverpost.com lurqer