Words Matter

The term "war on terrorism" has been politically useful for the Right since Bush started using it shortly after the invasion of Iraq. The idea that we are at "war" helped Bush win reelection and is used as the background justification for domestic wiretapping and detention policies that American's might never have otherwise allowed. Denying that "war" is the correct term for the state of conflict we find ourselves in with terrorists is a difficult part of an argument with people on the Right, it leads to the counter argument that liberals don't understand the "post 9/11" world; an argument I don't mind having but it is tedious to get bogged down arguing terminology.

Worse, liberals haven't really had an alternate term to describe the current state of conflict (see!). Well a sensible neocon has come to our rescue (I know that's a little depressing . . .any port in a storm I guess). Francis Fukuyama's essay in the NY Times Magazine refers to the conflict as a "struggle."

We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world.

Now calling it a "struggle" while they call it a "war" would've been political suicide a year ago. Voters were still deciding who to support based on their fear of terrorism and fear is too powerful a motivator to be countered with semantics. But the the political landscape will be dominated by Iraq and terrorism for the next decade so liberals better figure out another way to describe it if we want to convince people that our solution is better than the Right's. "Struggle" alone may not suffice as a sufficiently evocative term but it lends itself to many adjectives: "long struggle," "worldwide struggle," "historic struggle," even "violent struggle." All these terms capture the enormity of the task but are more honest and less Orwellian.

The larger point in Fukuyama's essay is that the Bush policy has failed and it's failed in part because Bush overreached by seeing the "new struggle" against terrorism and Islamo-facism as a "war." Wars are not fought against particular tactics--which is what terrorism is--or against ideologies--we didn't fight Communism as an ideology, we fought the nations that practiced a version of it which threatened us directly--wars are fought against opponents. Terrorism, and that variety of its wielders who loathe America and the principles of modernism and democracy, on the other hand are things which we must struggle to defeat. It is a struggle in part because unlike a war, we will not know when we have won until long after we already have.