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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: unclewest who wrote (97861)	1/31/2005 9:48:29 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 793743

Your viewpoint makes it appropriate to call the foreigners who attacked America on 9/11 insurgents? An illiterate one. That labeling is just silly. Insurgents are internal, not external. What we have in Iraq now is much more serious than the label insurgent or terrorist. Seriousness is not the key factor in the word choice. It might be if we had as many words for this concept as the Inuit have for snow. But we don't have a lot of options so we need to take care of the key elements first and foremost. What the word needs to convey, primarily, are the concepts of irregular, violent, and uprising. "Insurgent" does that. "Rebel" has the elements. "Terrorist" doesn't include all the elements although it's an accurate description as far as it goes. "Warrior" (from your "war") is iffy since war is generally external and generally regular and we usually use it to convey fierceness, not a type of political and military action. "Saboteur" I discussed earlier with CB. (Your argument about seriousness is relevant IMO to the choice of the "war" label, which is a separate question.) ...armed and equipped by foreign nations. As far as outside backing is concerned, I agree that neither "insurgent" nor "rebel" speaks directly to that, but insurgents and rebels have typically had outside backing both from outside governments and from individuals who joined the fight so that omission is of minor concern. At such time as Iraq declares war on Syria and/or Iran, then the label should be reconsidered. For now, it's ostensibly an internal movement so far as I know. If a critical mass of the movement is not Iraqi, then you have a point. It's my understanding that the Iraqi Baathists are the critical mass. I'm not arguing that "insurgent" is a perfect word. What I'm arguing is that, if not the perfect descriptor in the limited available pool, it's pretty darn close, too close for all this uproar about it.