Observation

[alouette]

Something I've noticed lately: the French seem to be habitually talking about the Iraq war as "the Second Gulf War" and thus talk about what I call the Gulf War as "the First Gulf War". I haven't seen so much of this in Finland or in the English sources I've read. I don't really know what to think of it. Partly it was "finishing the unfinished

Comments

[paralus]

There are people here who call it that, too. People won't settle on a name until they start writing about it in the history books. And hell, even that won't settle it -- at my friend's high school in Louisiana, the little their history books did talk about the Civil War, it was the "War of Northern Aggression."

Re:

[alouette]

Oh, Finns still can't agree on the name of our civil war in 1918. While the official name is a Finnish equivalent of "civil war", there are many who use other names - especially the "war of liberation" for those who were on the side of the Whites, which still gets on my nerves though I'm no longer a socialist who'd side with the Reds, because it's just inaccurate - and sometimes press on others that the name they use should be the only one allowed. It just feels odd that it'd be so particularly common in France compared to how much I've seen it elsewhere.

[soupytwist]

We get that here, too. Though it seems fairly explicitly a reference to the theory that Dubya was continuing his dad's campaign in the middle east, i.e. it was all about oil and the humiliation of being beaten by Saddam first time round.

Re:

[alouette]

...which is, I guess, why it's popular in France.

And that's why it bugs me, probably, because I think the war was about a lot more than that. Not like those things didn't play any role at all, but it's oversimplifying what happened.