'Surge' Protectors
Inside reports suggest President Bush has already decided on sending many more troops to Iraq starting next month. Until now, the media has bought into his labeling of this as a mere "surge." But the media needs to call it by its proper name: "escalation."
By Greg Mitchell
(December 29, 2006) -- Sometimes one little word, especially in the press, means a lot. Take “surge.” Or, if you prefer (as many now do), an alternative: “escalation.” No, I'm not talking about the very disturbing rise in U.S. deaths in Iraq this month.
“Surge” is what President Bush and his war planners have called a plan – not yet announced but rumored to be favored – to send 20,000 or many more troops to Iraq in the next few months. Sometimes they add the word “temporary” as a kind of prefix, though this may not be necessary since surges (electrical or tidal or sexual or whatever) always come and go.
In any case, the media (including E&P from time to time) have largely bought into the “surge” descriptive from its unveiling several weeks ago. You might call them "surge" protectors. Just today, for example, Reuters did the White House the favor of referring tthe idea as a "short-term troop 'surge' aimed at containing rampant violence."...
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With liberal bloggers leading the way, the call went forth last week: Henceforth ye shall purge the “surge” from your vocabularies and laptops and replace it with “escalation” – with all its echoes of Vietnam and, incidentally, accuracy regarding the current situation. Gradually, it has started to creep into the mainstream media and now candidates or possible candidates for president are heeding the call.
An editorial in Baltimore’s The Sun on Wednesday should serve as a template for others in the media. Here’s its key passage: “Now President Bush is said to be considering a ‘surge,’ the idea being that 20,000 additional troops could make a big difference and pave the way to a resolution of the war. A generation ago this would have been called an ‘escalation,’ and the problem with escalations, as President Lyndon B. Johnson learned, is that when they don't furnish the promised results the pressure to follow with further escalations is just about inescapable.”...Newspaper editorial writers should crib from the closing graf of The Sun editorial instead: “The strategists arguing for an escalation in Iraq seem to begin their reasoning this way: First, assume success. Then everything else should follow quite neatly and predictably. But the American people dropped that assumption some time ago, and they made it abundantly clear on Nov. 7. The war in Iraq has become a nightmare that is darker and more disconcerting than even the horrifying and wrenching events of 9/11 - and it is a nightmare with no end in sight.”...
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003525778
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