Does it matter that the Obama administration is now involved in “overseas contingency operations” rather than “fighting terror”? Is it important that our Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, refers to man-caused disasters rather than terrorism? And how about the news made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, when she was asked about the elimination of the phrase war on terror: “The administration has stopped using the phrase and I think that speaks for itself,” Clinton said. “It was controversial here [in Europe].”
The New York Times often used quotation marks around the war on terror during the Bush administration. National Public Radio commentators sometimes referred to “the so-called war on terror.”
The rhetorical struggle isn’t just about the war on terror, of course. It’s about the very notion of terrorism. To modify Burleigh Taylor Wilkins’ excellent definition, terrorism is violence against the property or lives of noncombatant civilians, whose purpose is to promote the terrorist’s cause by preventing moderate solutions or provoking extreme countermeasures. But when someone commits such an act, he usually graduates to militant status within a couple of days, if not immediately. Several months ago Judea Pearl, the father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, asked the question this way: “When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?”
It appears that those luminaries have won the war on the war on terror. Scores of innocents will continue to be killed by terrorists but their lives will no longer be part of a narrative that we understand as the fight against terrorism.
How the American people could elect such an Administration baffles me more each day. I guess Mencken knew what he was saying:
“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people”. – — H. L. Mencken
Yea, the 53% who elected this adminstration are almost as dumb as 50.5% who elected the last administration.