On May 8, 2007, at 3:42 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> There is thus no significant ideological brake inside the North on the
> so-called War on Terror.
Except exhaustion with war, perhaps?
I'm never sure what your point is in these denunciations of "social liberals" and "secular elitists." We should embrace social conservatives? They're a hell of a lot more likely to support the GWOT than are your current targets. If you're going to play political etymology, the term was coined by Reagan and revived by Bush.
Meanwhile, two presidential candidates think the GWOT is incoherent, as Carrol Cox might say.
Doug
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0507/3850.html
Biden wages war on 'war on terror' By: Ben Smith May 4, 2007 06:01 PM EST
John Edwards won praise on the left and criticism from the right when, at the first Democratic presidential candidates debate last month, refused to raise his hand to say he believed in the existence of a "global war on terror."
The man to Edwards' immediate left on the stage, Senator Joe Biden, didn't raise his hand either.
And while Edwards' opposition to the phrase crystallized recently -- references to the terror war were removed from his own website only after the debate -- Biden has been waging what has appeared, at times, to be a quixotic war on "the global war on terror" for years.
"The President continues to talk about 'the war on terror.' That is simply wrong," Biden, who now chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said in a speech at the National Press Club last September.
"Terrorism is a means, not an end, and very different groups and countries are using it toward very different goals. If we can't even identify the enemy or describe the war we're fighting, it's difficult to see how we will win."
The notion of a "war on terror" dates back in American politics at least to a 1986 speech by Ronald Reagan, but it was President Bush who formalized it soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks, turning the Global War on Terror -- or GWOT, as its known in military and White House circles -- into a technical term referring to American operations around the globe.
Critics, including foreign policy "realists" with a more nuanced, case-by-case view of foreign policy, like former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, objected, as did some senior military officials, but the phrase spilled over into both common speech and congressional language.
Senate Republicans "used to put in stuff like 'a resolution complimenting so and so and helping us in the Global War on Terror,'" Biden said. "It's a dangerous notion -- it allows them under that rubric to include everything and it allows them to ignore other things."
So Biden instructed his staff to fight to take the language out of bills coming through the Foreign Relations Committee, something congressional staffers on both sides of the aisle said he did with some success, though the phrase still sometimes slipped through.
"Biden's staff has preferred other phrasing and there has not been a problem with that," said Andy Fisher, a spokesman for the committee's senior Republican, Richard Lugar.
And how does Biden explain how he kept the phrase out of legislation when the Democrats were in the minority?
The Republicans "would want to get whatever it was passed, and they knew I'd be the bastard at the family picnic who wasn't afraid to take the heat being 'weak on terror' -- I'd go in and rip them up," he told the Politico.
Biden isn't alone on the Hill in his objection to the phrase. In March, the House Budget Committee banned "global war on terror" from the 2008 budget.
And even President Bush and his former Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, at times backed away from the broad brush.
Since staking his claim to that fight, Edwards has been the most visible opponent of the phrase.
"This political language has created a frame that is not accurate and that Bush and his gang have used to justify anything they want to do," Edwards told Politico's Mike Allen in a Time Magazine column.
But other leading Democratic presidential candidates -- Senators Chris Dodd, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- all raised their hands to indicate they buy into the idea, as did New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson.
Biden has a theory about why many of his Democratic rivals put their hands up.
"I think that the whole political establishment of both parties has been either confused or a little intimidated by the president's jargon when he talks about terror," Biden said.
Biden argues that the blanket notion of fighting terrorism has damaged American interests not only in Iraq -- where he sees an irony in the emergence of strong Islamist enemies only after the American invasion -- but also elsewhere in the world, notably in the restive Russian republic of Chechnya.
"Terror is a tactic. Terror is not a philosophy," Biden said. "The war in Chechnya is a war of liberation -- it engaged in terrorist activities, but it it is fundamentally different."
Bush's insistence on seeing Iraq, Afghanistan, and other conflicts as fronts in the same war, Biden said, is "the reason why [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's gotten away with murder."
Biden declined to criticize his Democratic rivals, but said that it's his coherent foreign policy views that make him the best choice for the White House.
"The whole point here is that it's kind of hard, unless you've really spent a lot of time thinking about it, to figure out exactly where you think America's place in the world is, what its role is," he said.
"And the next president ought to be at least as smart as his advisors."