George W Bush has recently been giving a lot of speeches and press conferences about the “war on terror”. Some of his pronouncements have been surreal, as in this during a White House press conference:

You know, we used to think we were secure because of oceans and previous diplomacy. But we realized on September the 11th, 2001, that killers could destroy innocent life.

The idea that this was the first time killers had destroyed innocent life was reminiscent of Fox News’ description of the July 2005 London bombings as “the first homicide attacks in Western Europe”. The nature of the threat was metaphysically unprecedented. No one had ever before been a victim of homicide, or been killed. Truly was it a time to declare war on murder.

But in Cleveland, the President had something very revealing to say about the insurgency in Iraq:

The enemy in this case is disgruntled folks inside of Iraq, coupled with an al Qaeda presence there that wants to harm Americans again.

“Disgruntled folks”, hmm?

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Tony Blair yesterday said that his government needs to do more to tackle the issue of “failed asylum seekers”. As a phrase to describe people whose requests for asylum have been turned down, “failed asylum seekers” may at least be accounted an improvement on “bogus asylum seekers”, a term introduced by the Conservative government in the mid-1980s during controversy over the admission of Tamil Tigers, and later adopted enthusiastically by the incoming Labour government. According to the law’s presumption of innocence and what you might call a humane assumption of sincerity, there can be no such thing as a “bogus asylum seeker”: one is simply an asylum seeker until the point when one’s request has been granted or refused.

But the phrase “failed asylum seeker” is also doing some subtle Unspeak work. At first it might look like mere shorthand for what the Public Accounts Committee’s report calls “asylum seekers whose initial application to stay in the United Kingdom fails”. But in the construction “failed asylum seeker”, what has failed is not the application to stay in the UK, but the asylum seeker himself or herself. When we refer to a failed parliamentary candidate, or a failed musician, as it might be, we damn them with the odour of a kind of moral defeat. And so too with “failed asylum seekers”, who, one might be led to think, are failed people. Frankly, if their request for asylum has been turned down, it can only be their own fault.

Perhaps we might find this plausible if we had absolute faith in the justice of every decision to refuse asylum. However, given the remarkable fact that Jack Straw refused an Iraqi man’s asylum application in January 2001 on the grounds that he could be assured of a “fair trial” under Saddam’s regime, we might not have such faith. We might also remember that an initial judgment of “failure” may be reversed, as it is with the 20% of asylum refusals that are overturned on appeal . . .

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