The End of “Combat?”
“To begin with, combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is, even if they come from senior officials. The situation on the ground in Iraq is no different today than it has been for some months. Iraqi security forces are still fighting Sunni and al-Qaida insurgents. Many Iraqis remain very concerned for their country’s future despite a dramatic improvement in security, the economy and living conditions in many areas.“
— Memo from Tom Kent, AP’s standards editor, Thursday, September 2, 2010
AP has it right.
Combat is not over in Iraq. The war is not won, nor is combat over.
And by the way, the U.S. military doe s not have NON-combat troops. Even the combat support troops are fighting men and women.
As the AP accurately observes:
“50,000 American troops remain in country. Our own reporting on the ground confirms that some of these troops, especially some 4,500 special operations forces, continue to be directly engaged in military operations. These troops are accompanying Iraqi soldiers into battle with militant groups and may well fire and be fired on.”
What has happened in the Obama Administration has declared an official end to U.S.-led combat missions. We are pushing the Iraqis to the front, and backing them up with combat forces. I can well imagine U.S. troops engaging in some gallows humor, as the bullets fly and IEDs explode. “Good thing we’re not in combat anymore!”
Right. The shift from U.S.-LED combat operations to U.S.-BACKED combat operations is an important evolution for more than symbolic reasons, but It’s not the end of the war. Maybe the beginning of the end, or the beginning of the beginning of the end. So the AP and other news organizations are right to call what’s going on by its proper name: combat.
In contrast back in 2007 CNN, and some other new organizations briefly refrained from calling the reinforcements sent to Iraq a “surge,” thinking somehow that was putting a positive spin on the escalation of the war. “Surge” sounded temporary like a “storm surge,” and many of my editors were skeptical that the strategy would increase troop levels only in the short term.
I, on the other hand, believed that “surge” was a perfectly good word, and described pretty much what the military had in mind. In fact, anyone who was paying attention knew the Pentagon didn’t have enough troops for a permanent, or indeterminate increase in forces. And eventually CNN got over its uneasiness, and used the term “surge” as everyone else did.
Words do matter, and journalists should not adopt official language that obfuscates the facts. We talk about the war in Iraq, not Operation Iraqi Freedom. And when advise and assist puts U.S. troops in combat, we should not hesitate to call it that. We are not yet the the peacekeeping phase in Iraq.
