We no longer dilly dally with terms like ‘police action’

Opinion

Discussion

September 2, 2010

Our opinion The Moultrie Observer The Moultrie Observer Thu Sep 02, 2010, 10:09 PM EDT

| — It’s interesting to watch the “war of words” that often are waged in our nation.

For example, technically our in- volvements in North Korea and Viet- nam were “police actions” — not wars. We lost a heck of a lot of police- men in those “conflicts.” In Vietnam alone, more than 50,000 American ser- vicemen gave their lives.

But after a while, technical defini- tion gave way to public interpretation and in general the public referred to both events as “wars.” And that’s the way it should be. We don’t bury tech- nicalities, we bury soldiers. And it should be called what it is.

For many, the phrase “police ac- tion” diminished the great sacrifices made by our young men and women. And so in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been little if any pretense to refer to those engagements as “police actions.” Perhaps that’s because the public overrode the technical inter- pretations of the Korean and Vietnam tragedies and cut to the chase in these most recent wars.

We now refer to the “war in Afghanistan” and the “war in Iraq.” Technically, the war in Iraq is over. But that conclusion also must be veri- fied by the troops who actually will stay there for a while. In other words, the phrase “bringing our troops” home must also be qualified and de- fined in a much bigger picture.

The war of words have other exten- sions in this reference as well. At first our leaders uplifted the cause of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. When we didn’t find any, then it became “spreading democracy.” There are those who say we don’t even have a democracy, that we have a republic. But then so did the Soviet Union and North Vietnam. We never used the expression “spreading re- publicanism.” Maybe we are all just confused, though some say in Iraq it was about oil and in Afghanistan it was about finding Osama bin Laden. Surprisingly, we can find evidence of water on other planets many thou- sands of miles away but we can’t find bin Laden on our own planet in a country that’s just two rocks short of the Stone Age.

Well maybe we don’t have a war of words, maybe it’s just a police action action of words. We can be sure of one thing, it’s not a lot of words that are brought back in body bags, it’s our sons and daughters.

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