Addressing a joint session of Congress a little over
a week after the United States was attacked by al Qaeda terrorists, President George W. Bush stated that the nation
was now engaged in a “war on terror” that would involve conventional military
action, covert intelligence operations, and disruption of terrorist financing.
The phrase and the commentary surrounding it
illustrated both the highly unusual, even unprecedented, nature of the war and
the elastic nature of the U.S. government response. Both of these factors explain
why it has been impossible to bring the resulting military action to a
definitive conclusion.
First, notice what President Bush’s message was not:
a request that Congress declare war, even though “war on terror” may have been
the most enduring linguistic coinage from the address. Congress has not
fulfilled this constitutional duty since WWII. In a way, both the executive and
legislative branches get what they want from this state of affairs: a President
gets to act with maximum freedom to act, while Congress possesses plausible
deniability if a war to which it has explicitly acquiesced goes awry.
Early on, U.S. intelligence determined that the
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were carried out by
al-Qaeda, a terrorist network with training camps in Afghanistan. But unlike,
say, WWI and WWII, where the United States deemed that foreign governments were
directly involved in infringing on American sovereignty, the U.S. sought to get
at the perpetrators of 9/11 initially by confronting a party indirectly
responsible: the Taliban regime that allowed al-Qaeda to flourish within its
borders.
The nomenclature of a war how it will be prosecuted
and, decades later, how it will be perceived. The conflict that raged for four
years after the firing on Fort Sumter was known, particularly among
Northerners, as the “War of the Rebellion.” (Its primary documents are known as
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the
Union and Confederate Armies, or the “O.R.” for short among
historians.)
It was only after 1881, when former Confederate
President Jefferson Davis began to refer to it as the “Civil War,” that Union
advocates adopted it. (Manning and Rothman note that the new term was more
conciliatory than “War of the Rebellion,” but there may have been another
reason why it caught on: it was shorter. That convenience probably led them to
resist southern sympathizers’ attempt at a more nakedly ideological phrase for
the conflict: “The War Between the States.”)
The “War on Terror” (soon known as the “Global War
on Terror,” or the bureaucratic shorthand GWOT) was seemingly designed both to
describe the asymetric warfare of the enemy and to seize the moral high ground
claimed by victims. But it also opened the doors to a situation difficult, if
not impossible, to resolve. (No sooner would the resources of al-Qaeda be
dramatically reduced, for instance, than ISIS rose from its ashes.)
Had Bush delivered a sharply focused message after
9/11, he could have confined military and political objectives to the demands
he made on the Taliban in Afghanistan (e.g., “Deliver to United States
authorities all of the leaders of Al Qaeda who hide in your land”). Those
demands might have involved time to bring to a successful conclusion, even
bloodshed. But they would not have required a constant change in priorities
with new countries and organizations in this regional drama.
Bush thrust these new actors to the forefront only
four months later in his next State of the Union address. Not without some
controversy, he denounced an “Axis of Evil” of state-sponsored terrorism:
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the mullahs of Iran, and one of the last surviving
Communist regimes, North Korea.
Linguistic purists might have noted that
the original Axis powers that inflicted World War II on the world were already
dictatorial, so the “Axis of Evil” was a redundant phrase and the trio might have been
better called “the New Axis.”
But the Bush Administration missed an even
larger point: in the run-up to WWII, Germany, Italy and Germany were formally
bound by treaty, facilitating the military actions of each around the globe. In
contrast, 21st-century Iraq, Iran and North Korea might have been
hostile to the U.S., but had shown no inclination to cooperate militarily. (In fact, tensions between Iraq and Iran remained high, only a
dozen years after a drawn-out, bloody war between the two.)
Moreover, none of the three could be shown to have aided al-Qaeda in the 9/11
attacks. The “Axis of Evil,” then, was an advertising slogan more than an
actual structure of international affairs. If you want to be charitable, you
could call it a metaphor.
But the use of metaphor was a huge part of
the problem with the term “the war on terror” itself, which was no more of a
metaphor than WWI, WWII, or any other 20th-century American war.
Thousands of service personnel are not put in harm’s way for a “metaphor.”
There have been instances when “war” has
been used, correctly, as a metaphor: Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” Richard
Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” and a phrase that Jimmy Carter borrowed from
philosopher William James to describe his energy conservation program: “the
moral equivalent of war.” If any of these “campaigns” resemble the war on
terror, however, it lies in the meager results achieved despite immense
Presidential ambitions and government expenditures.
The War on Terror not only defined Bush’s
presidency, but limited the options, linguistic and otherwise, of his
successor. In a 2010 article in The Atlantic, Marc Ambinder pointed
to a new initiative of the Obama Administration, intended to replace the War on
Terror: Countering Violent Extremism (CVE).
The new term, meant to promote the use of “soft power” in stemming
terrorism, displays none of the imagination of its predecessor, however. It
reeks of the bloodless bureaucrat, someone ready to talk an issue to death
rather than to solve it. It’s death by linguistic rather than military
drone.
“When you talk about healing, I think I’ve developed
very good relationships over the last little while with the African-American
community. I think you can see that. I feel that they really wanted me to come
to that conclusion, and I think I did a great job and a great service, not only
for the country, but for the president, in getting him to produce his birth
certificate.” —Donald Trump to Lester Holt in last night’s debate with Hillary
Clinton, on whether his promotion of the false “birther” issue against
President Obama contributed in any way to racial healing, quoted in Amanda
Hoover, “Donald Trump Had ‘Nothing’ to Say About ‘Birther’ Issue to People of Color,” The Boston Globe, Sept. 27, 2016
