Gwynne Dyer: Both sides guilty of cynical manipulation of language

The first casualty of war is not truth, which generally dies well before hostilities begin. It is language.

Consider how Iraqi resistance fighters belonging to the Fedayeen organisation and the Baath Party militia have been renamed in only a week.

At first American spokesmen referred to them using neutral words like "irregulars" and "guerrillas", for even if they are not wearing uniforms their actions are legal so long as they are clearly armed and not pretending to be civilians.

But after the first suicide bomb attack the Pentagon started calling Iraqi militiamen "terrorists" even if they are fighting in the open against American and British soldiers - and United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began to talk about "death squads".

This change of terms helps to buttress the fiction, now believed by 55 per cent of Americans, that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has links with the Islamist terrorists of al Qaeda.

Indeed, 42 per cent of Americans have been tricked into believing that Saddam was responsible for the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11 thanks to the relentless juxtaposition of the two in President George W. Bush's speeches (though he never lies outright by actually saying so).

But this cynical manipulation of language pales by comparison with Saddam's latest change of skin.

Saddam joined the Arab Socialist Baath (Rebirth) Party as a teenager, and has shared its secular and even anti-religious views all of his life.

But last Monday, he wrote this in an appeal to the Iraqis and the broader Arab and Muslim worlds: "The aggression ... against the stronghold of faith is an aggression on religion and on the land of Islam. Jihad is a duty. Whoever dies will be rewarded by heaven ... "

Iraq the stronghold of faith? Jihad as a duty? Give us a break.

Iraq's Baath Party is modelled on the Eastern European Communist parties of the 1950s (including party militias, torture chambers and hostility to religion). Saddam's hero is Joseph Stalin, not Osama bin Laden.

But just as Stalin enlisted the Russian Orthodox Church in his struggle against the German invasion in 1941, Saddam is willing to ally himself with popular Islamic sentiment in this crisis.

He has done it before, praying in the great Shia mosque in Kerbala (though he himself is of Sunni stock) at the height of the war against Iran in 1985.

As a highly politicised and radical interpretation of Islam gained ground across the Arab world during the 1990s, Saddam tried to pre-empt it with public displays of devotion and a lavish programme of mosque-building.

But Islamist enthusiasm continued to be a career-killer in Baathist circles, and Iraq remained the most secular of Arab states.

Now the Iraqi regime faces its gravest crisis, and suddenly it is all about jihad and the "land of Islam". And the Islamists of the Arab world, every bit as cynical as Saddam, let bygones be bygones.

Iraqi military spokesman Hazim al-Rawi declared that "martyrdom [suicide] operations will continue not only by Iraqis but by thousands of Arabs who are coming to Iraq," and sure enough the Palestinian rejectionist group Islamic Jihad promptly announced "the arrival of its first martyrdom attackers in Baghdad ... to fulfil the holy duty of defending Arab and Muslim land".

They still privately despise Saddam, but are not going to miss out in a chance to associate their cause with Iraq's.

Everybody in this conflict is sailing under false colours - and that certainly includes the coalition forces.

Bush's coalition has no UN authority because the overwhelming majority of UN members saw an invasion of Iraq before the arms inspectors had time to finish their work as a wanton act of aggression.

The independent Arabic-language TV network al-Jazeera began calling the US and British troops by their own preferred title, "coalition forces", but now refers to them as the "invaders" or "occupiers". Viewers got fed up with the hypocrisy.

Herald Feature: Iraq war