War of words over the "War on Terror"

President Obama has studiously avoided the term "war on terror" from the moment he was sworn in. You don't need to watch Fox News for long to see that the hard right in America has noticed this and given him a very hard time about it. On Thursday, Obama gave a nationally televised  address about the attempted Christmas Day bombing and said with great clarity, "We are at war."

At his inauguration one year ago, I wrote a column about the new president's choice of words in the context of his strategy on fighting terrorism. I was impressed that in his speech he never used the phrase "war on terror" and I felt it stood in marked contrast to his predecessor, whose administration used the acronum GWOT for "Global War on Terror" to encompass everything from Fallujah, Iraq, to a grandmother having to cough up her sewing scissors at the airport.

From my 16 years of covering terrorism around the world, I thought not using the phrase "war on terror" showed a sophistication about how you win in the struggle against terrorism. If you call it a "war," you almost immediately lose, at least that is the accepted wisdom among many experts in places like the United Kingdom and France who have been in long struggles against terrorism — struggles they eventually won or at least threats they succeeded in dramatically reducing.

There is no conventional approach that will stop a son of a banker from Nigeria from going to Yemen to become radicalized and then sewing a chemical explosive into his underpants and boarding a Detroit-bound airline with the intent of killing everyone on it. Tanks and bombs are not going to stop that. But sophisticated intelligence gathering, constant monitoring, aggressive prosecution, the hard work of building diplomatic and military alliances and valuable human intelligence are the best shot at thwarting such attempts.

That does not mean surgical strikes and counterinsurgency campaigns are not part of the mission. They are. But when they are defined as the whole mission, when the struggle is reduced only to "war," some very good minds on terrorism believe we are creating a pretext for failure. 

And then Thursday, in his nationally televised address where he publicly called for the intelligence community to do a better job after glaring mistakes were made in the attempted Christmas Day bombing, Obama went the other way.

Obama said: "While passions and politics can often obscure the hard work before us, let's be clear about what this moment demands. We are at war."

So now "we are at war" according to Obama. It's probably not fair to say that Obama used these words because of pressure from the right, but I think there are many Republican hawks who will claim a victory of sorts here. The president is struggling in recent weeks to find the right tone in his struggle against terrorism, how to temper strength and endurance, how to show confidence and diminish fear. When he accepted the Nobel, he tried to define a "just war" in a post-9/11 world. He's clearly a master of words and a very strong thinker, but I hope he will stick to his own words and not give in to the very human need to simplify what we're up against in this long, complex struggle against terrorism.

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/worldview/100108/war-words-terror