It's a good start, but I agree. (4.00 / 2)

To end the "war on terror," you can't just drop the name. The administration must drop the policies, too.

The language does matter, though.

Remember this?  May 23, 2007:

The U.S.-led war on terrorism is "a bumper sticker, not a plan" that has weakened Washington's global standing, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards said on Wednesday as he unveiled his defense policy plans.

snip

The war on terror is a slogan designed only for politics, not a strategy to make America safe. It's a bumper sticker, not a plan," Edwards said. "It has damaged our alliances and weakened our standing in the world."

"By framing this as a 'war,' we have walked straight into the trap that the terrorists have set -- that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war against Islam," said the former senator from North Carolina.

http://www.reuters.com/article...

the words we use matter.  George Soros called the GWOT, a failed metaphor.  

That said, however, you're right.  it matters more to end the polcies.

Reading the May 2007 article I also ran across this:

In an address to the Council on Foreign Relations, Edwards urged the U.S. Congress to use its funding power to force an immediate pullout of up to 50,000 U.S. combat troops from Iraq, then a full withdrawal within a year.

http://www.reuters.com/article...

Obama and Clinton both voted for that, but I think their fingers were crossed.

Now we stay in Iraq through December 31, 2011.  And few raise their voices.

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by: Tom Wells @ Tue Mar 31, 2009 at 16:26:42 PM UTC

Remember when (4.00 / 1)

Hillary defended her embrace of the GWOT by citing her living in New York and firsthand knowledge of 9-11? Ugh. So yeah, this is a step in the right direction and seems to represent a victory for Obama advisor Samantha Power, who wrote this last year:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07...

Six years later, most Americans still rightly believe that the United States must confront Islamic terrorism - and must be relentless in preventing terrorist networks from getting weapons of mass destruction. But Bush's premises have proved flawed, and the war-on-terror frame has obscured more than it has clarified.

As with the war on drugs and the war on crime, the invocation of "war" initially seemed metaphorical (we do not send the 82nd Airborne into downtown Detroit to combat street crime). But in the terrorism context, war proved less a rhetorical frame than a strategic assertion that armed conflict (that is, ground and air invasions of other countries) was the main tool the United States should employ to neutralize terrorism. The United Nations-endorsed war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan gave way to a period in which the Bush administration used its post-9/11 political capital to smuggle its pre-existing anti-Saddam Hussein agenda to the fore - with disastrous results for American forces, for Iraq and for the wider strategic goal of eliminating Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups

Now if only Obama would listen to Power on the I-P conflict.

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by: david mizner @ Tue Mar 31, 2009 at 17:15:32 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Now if everyone would just stop using "jihad" (0.00 / 0)

The word in Arabic doesn't necessarily connote violence, and certainly not terrorism, but it tends to be used with those connotations in the US media. Makes it seem like we're at war with Islam itself, which of course plays right into Al Qaeda's framing.

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by: Chachy @ Tue Mar 31, 2009 at 16:57:07 PM UTC