Language Shifts

Last week the Administration unofficially dropped the term "Global War on Terror" for a stranger, more distanced phrase: the "global struggle against violent extremism." Along with all the caps locked initial letters, the phrase lost a lot of power and determination. The Perplexed America was unsure what to make of this linguical shift- is it a harbinger of a more expansive project? Is it a midterm political manouver? What is the aim of this language shift?

George Packer at the New Yorker has broken down the way that The Administration's language has shifted in the past, and finds that this is a serious and somewhat sincere faltering. It is, in many ways, a sign of The Administration's growing weaknesses. In a piece of political writing that I, Liberal Blogger GeneralStan can only hope to approach [and indeed makes me feel as though any further voice I add to this topic only clouds the air], Packer shows that this language shift is a tell-tale sign that The Administration is waving the white flag-

Admitting Defeat in the Global War on Terror. [This piece is not long and is a HIGHLY recommended read]

The President’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, once said of war planning for Iraq, “You don’t introduce new products in August,” but the rebranding of the war formerly known as G.W.O.T. has all the earmarks of a full-blown summer marketing campaign. What’s going on here?

Something serious, in fact—almost unprecedented. The Administration is admitting that its strategy since September 11th has failed, without really admitting it. The single-minded emphasis on hunting down terrorists has failed (“Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people,” Gregson said). The use of military force as the country’s primary and, at times, only response has failed, and has stretched the Army and the Marines to the breaking point. Unilateralism has failed. “It’s not a military project alone, and the United States cannot do it by itself alone,” Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy and a leading advocate of going it alone with military force, said on his way out the Pentagon door and into private life (good luck, fellas!). The overwhelmingly American character of the war has failed, isolating moderate Muslims—who, in the end, are the only hope for political change—or driving them closer to the radicals. Loading the entire burden of the war onto the backs of American soldiers, while telling the rest of the citizenry to go about its business, has failed, even as public relations: in a recent Gallup poll, only thirty-four per cent of Americans said that we are winning the war on terrorism. The phrase has outlived its enormous political usefulness.

These recognitions are late in coming. Arguments for a broader, deeper, more nuanced strategy appeared in the report of the 9/11 Commission, a year ago. They were the basis for a sixteen-billion-dollar national-security bill that was introduced by Senate Democrats in January, and is currently going nowhere. At the Pentagon, they date back to October of 2003, to a memorandum in which Rumsfeld candidly asked, “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” Almost two years later, in the summer of Sharm al-Sheikh, Netanya, London, and Baghdad (where 7/7 is an average day), the answer is no. Jihadis are crossing the borders into Iraq, for example, far faster than they can be killed or kill themselves. A recent study by an Israeli researcher shows that they are predominantly young Saudis, inflamed by footage of the fighting in Iraq and by incendiary sermons from their imams. Do they hate us for who we are, or for what we do? That turns out to be the wrong question. Most of the new jihadis had no connection to terrorism before the Iraq war; the American occupation has filled them with fantasies of violent death. But they come largely from a region in Saudi Arabia where the most extreme Islamist ideology was already flourishing, directed against Shiite Muslims as well as against “crusaders and Jews.” They have the sympathy of millions of fellow-travellers. The war in Iraq is the trigger, not the reason, for their self-annihilation.