Congress and the President are at odds over war policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The House and Senate attached timelines to the military supplemental bills, which President George W. Bush will veto. At the same time, more than half the American people believe that victory is not possible in Iraq. These battles are nothing compared to the thrown-down brewing over what to call the war that everyone is talking about and no one really likes.
The cringe-inducing word “crusade”-conjuring up images of the noble Christian riding out to smite the Muslim hordes-was dispensed with long ago. In Europe, just a week after September 11, 2001, President Bush warned that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile.” After many jumbled words of reassurance to Muslims throughout the world, he has largely succeeded in keeping that word from creeping into his speeches.
Then we had the Global War on Terrorism, shortened in typical military style to G-WOT, which also brings to mind the rap outfit G-Unit (where 50 Cent got his start) whose first album was titled “Beg for Mercy.”
And then, perhaps in recognition of the difficulties in actually waging war against something as decentralized, amorphous and ill-defined as the collection of tactics often called terrorism, the formulation of “the long war” made its debut. As in: “Our own generation is in a long war against a determined enemy.” President George W. Bush, State of the Union, January 31, 2006.
But, on Tuesday the New York Times reported that U.S. Central Command has retired the phrase “the long war” as a way of describing the war on terrorism. As a spokesman for Central Command explained, “the idea that we are going to be involved in ‘Long War’ at the current level of operations is not likely and unhelpful.”
The change, he continued, is “a product of our ongoing effort to use language that describes the conflict for our Western audience while understanding the cultural implications of how the language is construed in the Middle East.”
According to Central Command-which is in charge of the war in Iraq and other aspects of the-military-operations-formerly-known-as-GWOT-additional no-nos include describing the enemies as Islamic (or Islamo) Fascists, jihadists, or part of Salafist Extremist Networks and employing the term “Global War on Terror.”
President Bush forges blithely past these semantic subtleties. Standing before teachers, students, members of the Tipp City, Ohio Chamber of Commerce on April 19, he described ongoing military operations in Iraq and elsewhere as “a unique war” and later an “interesting war.”
He also seemed to pooh-pooh CENTCOM’s sensitivities about language with his own adaptation of Louis Armstrong’s “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, saying: “I call it a global war against terror. You can call it a global war against extremists, a global war against radicals, a global war against people who want to hurt America; you can call it whatever you want, but it is a global effort.”
I’m with Armstrong: Let’s call the whole thing off.
It does not look like the General David Petraeus got the memo yet. Speaking at a Pentagon briefing on April 26, the commander of operations in Iraq told reporters Iraq will require “an enormous commitment and commitment over time” from the United States.
That sounds a lot like a long war to me. He went on to say “there is vastly more work to be done across the board… We are just getting started…”
But, just because Central Command has identified the limitations of these terms, does not mean they have come up with something better…
“We continue to look for other options to characterize the scope of current operations.”
So, wordsmiths and framing experts: They need you! Get your motors running! You could be responsible for a term that captures the seemingly endless bloody morass of U.S. military operations in a culturally sensitive way.
It will be quite the challenge While some are turning to their thesauruses for synonyms for quagmire and fiasco that don’t have such negative connotations, I would rather listen to Senator Harry Reid, who said “I believe … that this war is lost” on April 19th, maybe at the same time that Bush was tomato/tomāto-ing his way through Ohio.
Get that Central Command? It is not the Long War, but the Lost War… And it’s a lousy lurid lunacy that it will lumber on until the American people make it stop.
Frida Berrigan is a senior research associate at the World Policy Institute’s Arms Trade Resource Center.
© 2007 TomPaine.com
It’s not a “war.” Rather it’s a military occupation following an illegal invasion. There was no resistance to the invasion and no battle for Baghdad. It was handed over. There immediately ensued the plunder of Iraq until the criminal boss Bremer left town. The long occupation then began, punctuated by an insurgency that anyone with even one neuron could have predicted. Indeed, many of us predicted precisely that.
And now, after years of fruitless effort at an undefined and ill-advised mission that no army could reasonably carry out, after shedding the blood of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, here we are spinning our wheels in the desert while draft-dodger chicken-hawk politicians bray about a mythical “victory” that can never be achieved.
How many more bodies, President Bush? How many more?
Is “imperialist grab for oil no matter what the cost in blood and treasure” too long and unwieldy?
How many more lies? How many more bodies? When does the impeachment begin?
Pretty amazing the dearth of leadership, the choice the Supreme Court made not only for America, but the world, at a time so many prophecies speak of as a key turning point for mankind. Years ago I was on a flight and as the plane pierced the cloud cover, there was the rainbow. How many readers know that when you’re in the sky, the rainbow completes a full circle? The point of this metaphor is that everything comes full circle. Any extremeist–say Bush’s cover of fighting the war “against terror” comes full circle in that he has obviously exacerbated conditions to now effectively induce a “long war.” So sad for mankind that at a time when real leadership might have defused global conflict, reached above the petty differences of native lands to the common cause of arriving at environmental incentives to SUSTAIN life, this legion is squandering our nation’s soul and fortune on shedding yet more blood. The only god that warrants such sacrifice is Mars. Call it crusades, but it’s an excuse for inestimable violence, the wonton destruction of this magnificent Creation… which exists for all branches of the tree of life, which produces the various races.
“Stop the Killing Now”
Let’s call it what it really is, the global war for energy resources control and fascist corporate profit.
gwercafcp
By “global” he does not mean that it involves allies from all over the world, but rather that the US and its armies and missiles will engage the enemy everywhere. If you do not live in the USA then as far as GW is concerned your neigbourhood is a designated free-fire zone.
I still go with the original - The War Against Terror - TWAT.
But how do we designate the Decider in Chief?
Is he a War President? A Whore President? A Warp Resident?
I think here, too, we should stick with the original - he’s a TWAT.
Operation Iraqi Liberation - OIL
It’s
“The-guy-tried-to-kill-my-daddy-
and-now-I’m-going-to-kill-him-
and-take-all-his-oil” war.
You demean the noun twat when you apply it to the low-life that has been buggering up the world for the rest of us.
This is not war; it’s theft. The real administration, as opposed to the temporary Bush administration, never intends to leave Iraq. What do you think they went there for in the first place?
How can we let the Bush regime kill and cripple so many innocent people without demanding that they be impeached and prosecuted for their crimes against humanity?
How can Americans be so terribly complacent and unsympathetic to the millions of victims of the pentagon/white house?
Steve Osborn April 29th, 2007 12:41 pm
This list of bloody villains is worse than MAFIA CLAN TAKEOVER…..
Cheney Converts to Islam
Posted by Eric Kenning on March 02, 2007
Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, was sworn in as the nation’s first Muslim member of Congress in early January, but he is not the highest-ranking Muslim official in the United States. That honor belongs to Vice President Dick Cheney, who during one of his many trips to Saudi Arabia in the 1990s on behalf of Halliburton secretly converted to Wahabbi Islam, a rigorous fundamentalist version of the faith. In 1997, according to sources in Riyadh, Cheney visited the dusty provincial town of Bakh-Asward, a Wahabbi stronghold, where he realized he had found exactly what he was looking for, a religion that was grim, rancorous, authoritarian, and violent, and yet, on the other hand, insane.
Since that time, Cheney has been working tirelessly to restore the medieval Islamic empire, or caliphate, in the Middle East and has actually been toying with the idea of naming himself caliph, or at least pulling strings behind the scenes as vice caliph. The centerpiece of this secret strategy has been the carefully planned and executed war in Iraq, which has done so much to raise the prestige and power of jihadists in that country and elsewhere. That’s why Jihadtime magazine, a weekly published out of a cave somewhere between the lawless Pakistani border region of North Waziristan and the lawless Afghan border region of South Wazooistan, sent Cheney a copy of its year-end issue with a mirror on the cover, which proclaimed that “Our annual ‘Person of the Year’ is you–yes, you, along with all the other neo-armchair warriors out there who have done so much for our cause.”
Cheney has kept his faith a private matter, choosing not to reveal it to President Bush, a sincere Christian who has vowed to read the entire Bible someday, just as soon as he finishes My Pet Goat. But it has led to considerable tension in the Cheney household, where the devout veep unrolls a prayer rug and prays five times a day facing toward an oil well just outside Mecca. In particular, his conversion to Wahabbi Islam has led to bitter arguments with his daughter Mary, who converted to an entirely different sect, Wasabi Islam, while having dinner at a fusion sushi and shish-kebab restaurant in Georgetown last month with her partner Heather Poe. The heated exchanges between father and daughter have been further complicated by the fact that Cheney’s wife, Lynne, is a devotee of the ancient Egyptian snake goddess Irma.
Cheney’s strict adherence to militant Islam has also caused problems with his fellow neoconservatives, most of whom are equally devout, but adhere to a rival sect, militant Bedlam.
simonhhh thanks for the laugh, medicine in times like ours!
“War on Whatever” gets my vote as an accurate description of GWB’s politics.