More Troops–'Escalation'? Or 'Surge'?
What do you call a decision to send 20,000 or more additional troops to Iraq?
It depends on whom you ask. President Bush and his team call it a "surge." Increasingly, Democrats and those who oppose the increase are calling it an "escalation," invoking an old specter from the Vietnam era. Even David Letterman, in last night's "Top Ten Features of Bush's New Iraq Plan," used the word in No. 2: "Raise money for escalation by robbing Mick Jagger's apartment."
Escalation is a highly loaded term. The U.S. News library team tracked the earliest uses of the word in a military context during the Vietnam era and found that it first surfaced in a series of increasingly critical New York Times editorials in the spring and summer of 1965. The word gained traction from there and by 1968 was showing up on protest signs and in the language of the antiwar movement.
Surge, on the other hand, owes its recent popularity to use by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and other military officials. Speaking from Baghdad last month after meeting with Army generals, Gates said they "discussed the possibility of a surge and the potential for what it might accomplish." The term also cropped up a few weeks earlier in the Iraq Study Group's statement that it would support "a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad." "'Surge' suggests it's a short, time-limited event, but at the moment the president is not willing to put any time limit on the whole enterprise," Democratic pollster Geoff Garin said. So far, Bush hasn't said how long his "surge" would last. He might make that clear in his prime-time address to the nation tonight, but don't bet on it.
White House officials say it all depends on how successful the troops are in stabilizing Baghdad in the larger pursuit of what Bush calls "victory," and that won't be known for months. The battle over "surge" or "increase" vs. "escalation" echoes other emotionally weighted word battles of the past, such as "prolife" vs. "prochoice" in framing the abortion debate and "estate tax" vs. "death tax" in describing taxation of inherited assets.
And let's not forget "taxes" vs. "revenue enhancers."
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