Long ago, the media and the rest of us should have stopped calling the occupation of Iraq a "war." It's remarkable how easily we have been duped by the White House spinmasters in the word game they are so good at--no, on second thought, how really gullible we are. So, it is really the badly managed occupation we should be addressing and not a war. If we call it a botched occupation, at least we're putting to rest the other nonsense that Bush keeps babbling in his now tiresome mantra..".If we fight the terrorists in Iraq we won't need to fight them here."
Then, too, we can address more clearly the matter of troop withdrawal from an "occupied" country and not one we're at war with.
Psychologists have long recognized that words become symbols. The wrong word, e.g., "war," in this case calls up a freight of meanings that are altogether different than the word "occupation."
If we leave Iraq we're not losing a war, we're simply declaring that our period of occupation is no longer useful, and therefore should be concluded. Take WWII, for example. We defeated Japan in a war, and were also successful in the occupation of Japan. If we had not been successful, then we would probably have had to go to war again with Japan. Fortunately, this did not happen. But at least we we were using the right words, i.e, "symbols" , so our thinking was crystal clear then.
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