What's in a name?

IN THE NEWS

Fred Kaplan at Slate has just noticed that the official US counterterrorism strategy has a dumb name. Correction: It had a dumb name, the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Now it's called the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (GSAVE).

I've heard the "missing link" between these two monikers, the Global War on Extremism (GWOE), for months. GSAVE isn't exactly new, therefore.

In any case, I don't like any of these terms. They obscure more than they reveal, and as Kaplan says, there's a little too much of a PR ring to them.

Still, names do matter, so it's worth the time of someone in the Administration to worry about them. Unfortunately, there's no pithy acronym for the real conflict, The Undeclared War on the Al Qaeda Network and All Its Local Allies. (UWAQNAILA?) As I've noted from practically the first day I started this blog, we're not (or shouldn't be) fighting a war against terror as a frame of mind or terrorism as a method. These categories are so broad that they risk confusing the US public and its government about whom and what we're fighting, and whether the campaign is inherently winnable. Meanwhile, we have to stay focused on the real enemy, Al Qaeda and its "clients," so that we can prevent further 9/11-like attacks. Because our enemy, Al Qaeda, operates on a global scale, doesn't commit us by default to a global commitment to assorted conflicts where Al Qaeda may have a presence. Because the US government never declared war—against Afghanistan, Iraq, or Al Qaeda itself—there were no pressures to sharpen the definition.

But now I'm repeating myself, over a year after I started this blog. Still, it's worth noting that, four years after 9/11, there's no clear definition of the war we're fighting.

Comments

[victor falk]

Yeah, everything was Gwot the fuck, but now we're Gsaved from our Gwoes.