Who are the insurgents?
Washington rhetoric about the war raises many questions. By Rob Elder In war, he who rules the rhetoric controls the high ground. Take the current term for people we are fighting in Iraq. Previously, Washington officials called them Saddam sympathizers and foreign terrorists. But most are Iraqis and many never liked Saddam. So now they’re “insurgents.” If you ask Google for a definition of insurgent, you get “a person who takes part in an armed rebellion against the constituted authority (especially in the hope of improving conditions).” That’s not so bad. But my Random House Thesaurus associates insurgent with synonyms including rebel, traitor, turncoat, deserter, anarchist, dissenter, malcontent, maverick and upstart. Those sound like bad guys to me. But if the Iraqis are the insurgents, how come we’re the ones shooting up their country and trying to get them to adopt our kind of government? Much of the rhetoric about Iraq raises questions. President Bush keeps saying Iraqis want f
