THE “WAR on terror”, George Bush once declared, “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated”. But the Obama administration, it appears, has ended it rather more discreetly – by e-mail.
A message sent recently to senior Pentagon staff explains that “this administration prefers to avoid using the term Long War or Global War On Terror (GWOT) ... please pass this on to your speechwriters”.
Instead, they have been asked to use a bureaucratic phrase that could hardly be further from the fiery rhetoric of the months immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The global war on terror is dead; long live “overseas contingency operations”.
Rumours of the imminent demise of the “war on terror” had been circulating for some time, and some key officials have been mentioning “overseas contingency operations” for weeks. The defence department e-mail, obtained by the Washington Post, seems to confirm the shift, although the office of management and budget, which reviews the public testimony of administration personnel in advance, denied that it had ordered an across-the-board change in language.
As British prime minister, Tony Blair was an avid supporter of Bush’s terminology – “whatever the technical or legal issues ... the fact is we are at war with terrorism”, he once said – but experts came to agree that a “war on terror” was too broad ever to be won.
Even Donald Rumsfeld, one of the war's architects, tried in vain to persuade Mr Bush to rebrand it the "global struggle against violent extremism" or GSave. In January the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, said the phrase might have caused "more harm than good". – ( Guardianservice)