Were again seeing the

We’re again seeing the importance of language in politics. Or, more specifically, the way that orotund, abstract language can obfuscate truth-telling, accountability, and just simple facing of reality.

We hear again and again how all the bombings and mayhem are obscuring all the good things that are happening in Iraq. But this is like how the thunderstorm ‘obscures’ the underlying sunny day.

Watching Paul Bremer today on CNN I was struck by his use of language like ‘enemies of freedom’ and terrorists to describe the people we’re fighting in the country (these are from my recollection, the precise phrases may be different.) People who kill soldiers are not, at least not by definition, ‘terrorists’. They’re guerillas or insurgents. This isn’t a matter of cutting them slack, but one of precision. And precision is required to know what we’re doing, what we’re trying to do, and how we can get from clarifying what our goals are to finding effective means to pursue their implementation.

This is part of what Orwell was getting at in “Politics and the English Language” when he lamented that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”