Not much happened this past week as a result of U.S. efforts to douse the flames in the Middle East. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell left the region without having brokered a ceasefire, an outcome he himself had predicted. Israel continued to ignore Washington's stern pleas that it start pulling out of the West Bank. And Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat remains holed up in his battered compound in Ramallah, either unwilling or unable to meet U.S. demands that he rein in terrorists forthwith.
But lest it be thought no headway was made at all, the Bush administration did make a bold move on the semantic front. Apparently deciding that there are no weapons as powerful as words, the White House last week adopted a new phrase to describe those Palestinians who blow up themselves and others as a means of waging war against Israel. "Suicide bomber" is out. "Homicide bomber," a phrase already picked up by at least one major U.S. television network, is in. Not that the administration cast the language change in partisan terms. According to White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, homicide bomber is simply "a more accurate description. These are not suicide bombings. These are not people who just kill themselves. These are people who deliberately go to murder others with no regard to the values of their own life."
The switch does not, of course, spring from anything so simple as a sudden desire for verbal accuracy. It is not even true that the preferred new phrase is more accurate. It is less accurate because it is less specific. Anyone who plants a bomb and then leaves the scene before the weapon detonates -- IRA terrorists, say, or Oklahoma City killer Timothy McVeigh -- is a homicide bomber. The Unabomber, who mailed his lethal weapons to distant victims, was a homicide bomber. How, if not by the use of a phrase such as suicide bomber, do we distinguish between this larger group and the subset of homicide bombers who kill themselves as well? Strictly speaking, the latter are "suicidal homicide bombers," but that is too much of a mouthful for everyday use -- and besides, the homicidal intent conveyed by the word "bomber" makes the phrase redundant. Everyone knows what a suicide bomber is, just as everyone knew during World War II what a kamikaze pilot was -- and that was a euphemism if ever there was one.