Skip Nav | Home | Mobile | Editorial Guidelines | Mission Statement | About Us | Contact | Help | Security | Support Us

World

Whatever happened to 'The War on Terror'

NEIL MACDONALD | 19.09.2007 02:01 | Anti-militarism | World

Neil MacDonald of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, is one of the last true journalists deserving of the title. He now reports from Washington, after being forced to end a long stint in the ME, due to Israeli death threats against his family.

NEIL MACDONALD:
Whatever happened to 'The War on Terror'
Sept. 11, 2007
It appears the Global War on Terror is coming to an end. It may even be over. No armistice, no surrender ceremony, just a rhetorical adjustment, and the clash of civilizations shrinks and shifts and morphs, and emerges as … a struggle.

Members of Congress noticed it on Monday as Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq, trod Capitol Hill on President George W. Bush's behalf. He was trying to assure the legislators who control the public's money that all the slaughter notwithstanding, things are looking cheerier in Iraq.

Petraeus, an immensely self-possessed man so decorated with brass and medals that he seems to sit with a stoop, used crisp, unemotional language to describe the vicious civil conflict in Iraq that he's trying to dampen. There was no florid talk about meeting and defeating the forces of evil and terror on the battlefield of history.

Ethnic and sectarian violence will continue, he said. Shia death squads are still active. And, as he put it, elements of "the global Islamic extremist movement" are there in force.

Global Islamic extremist movement?

The phrasing was not overlooked. "I find it absolutely astonishing that after three and a half hours of testimony that I can't recall anyone saying 'International War on Terrorism,'" observed Congressman Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat who heads the House subcommittee on the Middle East. "Because that is why we were supposed to be fighting there. So they're not fighting here."

The big buildup
Ackerman's confusion is understandable. Like other Americans, he has been listening to his president and his president's officials say for years that this nation is at war — a Global War on Terror — in which Iraq is the "central front."

As Ackerman noted, Americans were told repeatedly that they had to take the War on Terror to the terrorists, to keep the terrorists from bringing the War on Terror here. "Make no mistake about it," said President Bush in Texas on August 4, 2005. "We are at war. We're at war with an enemy that attacked us on September 11, 2001."

He used the phrase "War on Terror" five times during that address, and hundreds, if not thousands of times since the attacks of 9/11.

It worked pretty well, too. The whole country internalized it. Everybody started using it, even the Democrats.

Fox News and, to a lesser extent, CNN seemed to have "WAR ON TERROR" permanently plastered across the bottom of their TV broadcasts. Bumper stickers blared it. Anyone who questioned it was regarded as subversive.

Bush referred to himself as a "war president" and insisted, successfully, on special wartime powers. These included: warrantless wiretapping of American citizens; "extraordinary renditions;" and powers of arbitrary detention that flouted the U.S. Constitution.

Who exactly is the enemy?
Of course, the brilliance of the War on Terror, as a political device at least, was its imprecision. Who was the enemy?

In the end, the enemy was anyone the administration said was the enemy, and often that information was classified. Soldiers went off to fight in Iraq, Afghanistan as well as uncounted secret battles worldwide as special forces descended on places like Somalia.

Secret prisons were set up as well. And Congress paid up, making hundreds of billions of dollars available to the president.

"Terrorists" were everywhere in those first few years after 9/11. Nests of them were uncovered and arrested in the U.S. and in Canada, too.

Some of them seemed dangerous. Others seemed clownish, people clearly incapable of actually carrying out any attacks — some were even homeless.

But no matter. Terrorism in the American discourse had become a state of mind, an intent and an attitude as much as an action.

The already murky definition of terrorist expanded far beyond those who slaughter innocents to advance an agenda. Government officials began describing those who attacked American troops in their own countries as terrorists. Entire towns and cities in Iraq were deemed to be teeming with terrorists. Battles against terrorists lasted days and convulsed cities.

Other national leaders picked up on it, too, and who could blame them? Governments from the Mideast to Eastern Europe and Asia found new legitimacy in often brutal efforts to crush opponents. The War on Terror conferred a licence that could not be argued with.

Even Stephen Harper, in Canada saw the power in the phrase. "Canada," Harper declared in January 2006, "has made an important contribution to the war on terror in Afghanistan."

Re-branding a war
But six 9/11s have now passed since the original. And, as Congressman Ackerman noted, the phrase War on Terror is out of vogue. British leaders stopped using it a while ago. And even here in the U.S., as a political tool, it's clearly exhausted.

Because, as the people who run focus groups here are no doubt telling their masters, the average citizen expects some sort of resolution to a war. You win a war, or you lose a war. At some point, though, and that point has clearly come in the U.S., people start asking when they can reasonably expect a VE Day. Or in this case, VT Day.

The answer to that, of course, is maybe never. Certainly not in this lifetime. Because the phenomenon the West commonly calls terrorism is not militarily defeatable. It stems from ethnic nationalism, tribalism and religion, forces as powerful and primordial as sex.

And when governments all over the world are calling their political opponents terrorists, the word loses its impact and, eventually, even its meaning.

The Pentagon knows that very well and has been trying to modify its message for some time.

The U.S. military dropped the phrase "the long war" last spring, and, as Ackerman noted this week, it generally avoids "War on Terror," too.

In 2005, at the behest of the military, then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to phase out War on Terror and test drove the phrase "global struggle against extremism" instead. It didn't take. His boss smacked it down in that Texas speech a few days later.

Now, though, even President Bush has come around. He's still clearly fond of Global War on Terror, and uses it from time to time, but "global struggle against extremists," or a variation on that theme, is now making it into his speeches, too.

It popped up in a speech in Washington in June, then in his remarks at Montebello, Que., in August and in Sydney, Australia, last week, at the Asia-Pacific meeting.

Perhaps it's seen as a less alarming term. It invokes something less apocalyptic and, importantly, more long-term. You can, after all, struggle forever, and the struggle itself remains a noble endeavour.

This rhetorical shift at the top can seem a bit rich to journalists, many of whom had reservations about using the term War on Terror, or even the word terrorist, in the first place.

Many reporters preferred to use words like, yes, "extremists," and took tremendous blasts of heat from conservative and special interest groups for doing so in the early years following 9/11.

Some of those groups fight on. A group called Freedom's Watch, for example, placed a full-page ad in the New York Times today, throwing President Bush's old rhetoric back at him and at Gen. Petreaus: "WE ARE FIGHTING A GLOBAL WAR AGAINST TERRORISM. SURRENDER TO TERRORISTS IS NOT AN OPTION. VICTORY IS AMERICA'S ONLY CHOICE."

It had an almost nostalgic ring to it.

NEIL MACDONALD

Publish

Publish your news

Do you need help with publishing?

/regional publish include --> /regional search include -->

World Topics

Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista

Kollektives

Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World

Other UK IMCs
Bristol/South West
London
Northern Indymedia
Scotland

Server Appeal Radio Page Video Page Indymedia Cinema Offline Newsheet

secure Encrypted Page

You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.

If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

IMCs


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech