No More War On Terror

Over the weekend the AP noticed that under President Obama, usage of the term 'war on terror' was fading out:

Since taking office less than two weeks ago, President Barack Obama has talked broadly of the "enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism." Another time it was an "ongoing struggle."

He has pledged to "go after" extremists and "win this fight." There even was an oblique reference to a "twilight struggle" as the U.S. relentlessly pursues those who threaten the country.

But only once since his Jan. 20 inauguration has Obama publicly strung those three words together into the explosive phrase that coalesced the country during its most terrifying time and eventually came to define the Bush administration.

Only once, during his speech to the State Department on January 22 has Obama used the words 'war', 'on', and 'terror' consecutively. This is good news if, like me, you think the idea of a war on an adjective is unwinnable. But the shift from a war on al-Qaeda to an "enduring struggle" against a network of loosely-affiliated extremist groups is a pretty big one, in word if not deed. Don't expect the 'war on terror' to be over any time soon.

Comments

[don mac namara]

Psychiatrists refer to "new words " , an unfortunate affliction of sufferers of schizophrenia - as neologisms .
Any one know what the art of invention of new phrases is called ?
Schizophrenics also use " word salad " , which of course is also used by the Harvard business School .
Obama .. I'm afraid the good boy friend is being compared to the bad boyfriend.

Besides is this agreement with Russia re the USA not locating missiles in Poland not reminiscent with the deal struck by RFK with the Russians over and after the Cuban missile crises over 45 years ago ?
Plus ca change ...

[don mac namara]

If you mean by the crises in Islam is between as that between the moderates and the fundamentalists, between the religious technocrats and the secularists , yes there is a crises . But its not for the one to solve .
The fundamentalists will triumph over the reformists as long as the poor are impoverished. impoverished of education , denied access to the web, denied availability to take up scholarships in the west.
But I think it is presumptuous of the west to assume authority of this role .
My test case would be Turkey. They as a society can choose to set aside sharia law and adopt secularist last .
If they choose to stay with what we describe as barbarism in meting out punishment , they will never gain access to Europe.
Maybe Bendeict VI was right and the Turks do not belong to the European family.
Erdogan seems to think that they can genuinely aspire to membership to the EU while large swathes of his population want to return to theocracy , or a system of government all but run by the Holy men . And they may choose this over participatory government ( democracy ) not from a yearning to cling so much to the past ( as was the case with Catholicism in Ireland during englosh occupation )
but a fear of that quantum leap in to the vast unknown.
The West should only show them what is on offer .
I saw this happening in Lebanon over a 20 yr period. The fundamentalists strove to keep the internet out of Southern Lebanon , and when it arrived they saw a serious drop in their suicide bomber volunteers .
Then Isreal invaded again and the volunteer queues lengthened again.
Forget the hearts. Win the minds . the hearts wil follow.

[Dave]

You're right. Islam is a very legalistic religion and the Turkish experience shows how difficult it is for a secular society of Muslims to separate the religious from the political. Relations between the military and the Islamic government have always been frosty. How many times has the Turkish military intervened to protect the country's secular institutions?

Turkey joining the EU -- The political doctrine of the natural rights of man would have to be fully embraced. Otherwise, I don't think it will work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights

[Dave]

"The fundamentalists will triumph over the reformists as long as the poor are impoverished. impoverished of education , denied access to the web, denied availability to take up scholarships in the west."
------

But even the educated youth embrace a conservative Islam. It's happening in Egypt and Mubarak is nervous with that rival party, which from what I understand, enjoys widespread support among young people.

If you think Muslims are angry with the deaths of 1,200 of their brothers and sisters in Gaza, just think of how they would react if Jews or Christians killed 300,000 of them in Darfur. Why do they put Darfur on the back burner? Is it because Muslims did the killing? Why don't Muslims condemn their brothers and sisters when they carry out mass killings of other Muslims?

http://blog.beliefnet.com/cityofbrass/2009/02/darfur-vs-gaza-african-muslims.html

"Ali A. Rizvi, a muslim blogger, asks the hard questions:

Where are the large-scale protests and outrage from the Muslim community over the senseless deaths and rape of hundreds of thousands of poverty-ridden African Muslims?

Why is there such a glaring discrepancy between the Muslim world's response to the atrocities in Gaza and the atrocities in Darfur?

If the Darfur genocide was being carried out by Jews or Christians instead of Arab Muslims, would we see a different response?"

GOOD QUESTIONS

[don mac namara]

IN a word - yes-- We would see a different response if the Christians or Jews did the killing or were the killed.
The world uses a different yardstick to measure atrocities in Africa. After all they are blacker than arabs or jews.
- and blacker than Obama , which is as about as black as the white world will tolerate - irrespective of intellect or power of oratory.
The exception was ML King .
But we live in an unequal world ; Not only have the victors always held the vanquished in perpetual state of oppression ; they also write the history and can thus frame public opinion for centuries .

I have no data on fundamentalism amongst the youth of Egypt.
I cannot comment on this . Do you have such data ?

[Dave]

Obama is the only type of black man America will have at its president. He's never been to jail. MLK went to jail. Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey went to jail. W.E.B. Du Bois had run-ins with the law too. ALL great black leaders have been to jail. You think Al Sharpton could ever be president? You think Jesse Jackson could ever be president? That's the distinguishing mark of all great black leaders. But they're not 'good negroes'. Obama is a good negro. He's never been to jail. That was the signal America sent to its black people when Obama entered the campaign. Sad but true.

He was also born from a white womb. Every US president was born from a white womb. There was a debate in the NAACP whether or not he was actually black enough to run as a black man. Do you think a man or woman born from a black womb could ever be president of the United States? I'm afraid not.

MLK's dream has not been realized -- Not "color of skin, but content of character." Colin Powell endorsed the man without any regard to his mindset and relationships he has with people. Powell actually said that Obama's Islamic connections don't matter. Powell is a high profile black man whose duties consisted of keeping the American people safe! Obama's connections to Rev. Wright and others who want to hurt America? How could these relationships not be important!? How can Obama's religion not be important? Powell has trashed Dr. King's dream. For Powell, blackness trumps democracy. Blackness trumps Christianity. Blackness trumps truth and justice.

[don mac namara]

I'm not sure I follow your drift , or whether it was intended to be taken seriously, or indeed whether it was directed at me ; however -Al Capone went to prison but did'nt make the White House- Same for Jack Ruby -Is this relevant ?

I made no comment about religion - so I'll skip that.
But whosoever the womb ,its the same difference. if the father is black and the mother is white you end up with the same compliment of chromosomes from both parents. Miscegenation is an old study of ours . We did it in 4 th grade .

We learned the Mendelian study (- George- Gregroir )
Lets leave dominant genes out of it for the present .

As for General Powel - wasn't he the only one who conceded the truth about the UN deception about the nuclear silos eventually.?
Yes . He told the lie . But the Un rolled over and let him do so largely unchallenged .
Didn't he also endorse Obama's presidency.?

As for the rest of it I guess its a question of "Take a bit of White man " versus " if you're black get back "
I get a feeling I know which song represents your ethos.

[Dave]

I don't know. I'm a bit cynical. In the back of my mind I get the feeling that the war on poverty was really a farce, and the civil rights movement was a liberal attempt to buy off black people. Maybe not, but I still wonder... I'm white, by the way.

Blaxploitation films allude to that. Like this one: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cFq_IR22mNk

Drug dealing being "the only game 'the man' left us to play."

But whites have paid dearly for Affirmative Action. No question about it.

[Dave]

FEITH ON WAR ON TERROR

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/02/douglas-feith-a-blogger-interview-on-iraq-and-jihadist-ideology.html

Douglas Feith's book, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, is coming out in paperback, with all proceeds going to charities that support veterans and their families. He conducted an interview with a few bloggers (myself, Red State, Powerline, Fausta et al). Here's a excerpt, and here's the audio - it's about an hour: Download DougFeithConferenceCall2.2.09

Geller: To what extent did the Islamic doctrines of jihad and the requirement to subjugate infidels under the rule of Islamic law enter into your calculations for Iraq, and do you think the persecution of Christians had anything to do with those doctrines?

Feith: Well ... uh, the jihadist ideology was obviously a major... issue, uh, in our analysis of the strategy for the war on terrorism. And one of the things the Pentagon took the lead on ... was calling attention to the ideological component of the war on terror, and one of the things I deal with with in the book (which is a very sad story), was how it was Rumsfeld and General Myers and others at the Pentagon, who over and over again, right from the beginning, right after 9/11, were emphasizing the importance of an ideological effort, a strategic communications effort and a general strategy for countering ideological support for terrorism. And when the rest of the government wasn't doing very much in that area, we created within my office, within the policy office at the Pentagon, the Office of Strategic Influence to do work in this area. And the Public Affairs people in the Pentagon and other people around the US government were very unhappy with the creation of this office, some of it was for turf reasons and some of it was for other reasons, but one of the consequences was somebody leaked - well, leaked, no - no, somebody lied - to The New York Times and gave a report saying that this Office of Strategic Influence was intending to lie to foreign journalists. And The New York Times ran a front page story saying that. It caused a big imbroglio that resulted in the shutting down of this office.

I don't think the US government has recovered to this day from that fiasco, because every time anyone suggested creating an office to really deal with jihadist ideology in a systematic or strategic way at the Pentagon, people would say, oh, no, we are not going to have another Office of Strategic Influence problem. And that meant the Pentagon couldn't do it, and the Pentagon was the place that kept recognizing the importance of the ideological struggle. The State Department, which was the logical place to do it, for its own institutional and cultural reasons wasn't inclined to fight the battle that way, and they tended to think that all we needed was a public diplomacy campaign. Uh, and that's why you got all these brochures that were famous about rebranding America and showing how America treats its Muslims very nicely and ...which is a fine thing to do but it is far short of an ideological campaign against jihadist extremism. And so anyway, I would say that one of big deficiencies in our strategy on our war on terrorism remains a serious effort to counter Islamist ideology.

Now your question was, how does that relate to Iraq, Iraq ... I mean, we did not view Saddam Hussein as, you know, as... pushing that ideology - the Baathist ideology was quite different, but what we were concerned about was that Saddam was the kind of guy who, for the other reasons, would likely be fighting us in the future as he had fought us in the past, and that he might, in a future fight with us, use his connections with various terrorist groups, some of whom were jihadist extremists, use them to hurt us. So we were concerned about that, but, uh, obviously the Saddam Hussein regime didn't have the same ideology as, for example, the Taliban regime had, which was much more in line with the jihadist ideology of Al Qaeda.

It's worse than I thought. State department brochures to fight the jihad.. It took so little to derail any real understanding of the enemy that means us dead or subjugated.

I guess that was when we lost the war.

Rumsfeld got it. Right after 911 Rumsfeld got it. But we had already been infiltrated.