The Linguistic Angle on World Domination

In today's newspaper, there's an Associated Press release (this means second-hand, not primary source material--perhaps a White Paper released by the current government?) with the headline "Lawmakers can't agree on new leaders."

Reference to those fighting against the invasion and occupation of their country by US forces as the  "Sunni insurgency" that has "overrun much of the country" reminded me of how we worded our attacks on and in Vietnam.

(Are you listening, NSA?  I'm sure you're not because I'm no one of significance.  But you'll be collecting this just the same, the way you collect everything.)

In Vietnam, the Americans were killing the Communists.  The word chosen for us, the Good Guys, was "Americans," a nationality.  The word used for our enemies, the Bad Guys, was Communists, not a nationality but an economic system or an ideology.  So why didn't they say Americans kill (number) Vietnamese?  They didn't want to remind the us and the rest of the world that we were in a foreign country killing the people there.  Granted, they sometimes referred to the Vietnamese not collaborating with us as the "Viet Cong."  But they avoided the word Vietnamese even while destroying the environment in South Vietnam, the part of the country where our allies were,  with Agent Orange and causing the worst environmental damage every done to a country.  

How interesting that our putting in a puppet government (complete with purple stained finger staging in an election that former  President Carter said couldn't been overseen by his committee because it wasn't in a safe area) is described as "an informal arranagement that took hold afater the 2003 U.S.-led invasion."  Here it is:

The speaker of Parliament's chair goes to a a Sunni
The presidency goes to a Kurd
the prime minister's post goes to a Shiite.

That's another way language manipulates thought.  Those wanting to vilify the Iraquis who are making trouble are just doing it because the Sunnis and the Shiites are in a religious war.  They're just a bunch of religious fantatics who want to throw stones at women and kills girls who try to go to school.  In fact, even under the dictatorship of Hussein, Iraq was more progressive than any other nation in the Middle East.  Women did go to school freely.  Sunnis and Shiite got along.

I just looked to see what has been written on this subject.  I know I read something recently by an Iraqi who said most Iraqis didn't even know who was Shiite or Sunni because it was so unimportant to them.  Here's something older I found:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3008556

Here's something from this very month by Juan Cole:

http://www.juancole.com/2014/06/myths-radical-advance.html