Thursday, April 26, 2007

The Name of the War

Two recent articles, one by Max Boot in the Wall Street Journal and the other by Michael R. Gordon in the New York Times, look at the issue of what we call the interconnected wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the other, related, below-the-radar military actions elsewhere in the world.

In the beginning, we had the "Global War on Terrorism," or "GWOT" (pronounced "gee-watt"). Most thinking people realized that this was stupid, because the enemy in this war is not "terrorism," which is a tactic. Then former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld floated the name, "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism," which was too long for the required media sound bites and took up too much column space in print...it was quickly deep-sixed. Some conservative historians and commentators suggested "World War IV" (which assumed that the Cold War was "World War III")...this didn't get any legs and also died quickly. "The War Against International Islamist Terror Networks" was too long and - worse - politically incorrect, so it disappeared almost before anyone heard it. The latest stab at a name came from General John Abizaid, the former head of the US Central Command, who called it "The Long War" in recognition of the fact that it was both a political and a military contest that would probably last for many years.

And, as you might expect, "The Long War" had a short life, too - it was quietly retired by the new CENTCOM commander, Admiral William Fallon, who believed the name worked against his desired focus on achieving results as quickly as possible to recover political will to continue the fight. And a CENTCOM spokesman explained that the change was "...a product of our ongoing effort to use language that describes the conflict for our Western audiences while understanding the cultural implications of how that language is construed in the Middle East."

In other words, "The Long War" implied to the populations of the Middle East that we would be killing people and breaking things there for a long time.

Long-time readers of this blog will recall that my undergraduate academic background is in Linguistics, while my masters' degree is in International Relations. The "what do we call this war" debate is one of those rare areas in which I can connect the two in my thinking.

As I've noted many times here, words matter. Don Imus now knows that, and an understanding of the power of negative words may even finally be getting through the ossified brains of the rap and hip-hop music communities. But as disgusting as rap lyrics may be, they are a mere noxious nuisance when compared to the power of descriptive words to shape international opinions about US policies. We can't say "crusade," because some people in the Middle East don't understand that the crusades ended more than 700 years ago. We can't say "War on Islamist Terrorism" because it's insufficiently politically correct. We don't want to say "The Long War" because it implies that this will be a ... well ... long war.

So what do we call it? A thundering term on the order of "World War Two" doesn't quite work for a grinding and poorly-focused counterinsurgency and counterterrorism effort. The original "Operation IRAQI FREEDOM" is sort of a bad joke now, since we appear to have given the Iraqis the freedom only to unleash the murderous passions long suppressed by Saddam Hussein.

I suggest that we can't call this war anything until we understand a few things about it. We need to clearly define:

Who's the enemy?

What's our desired end state (how do we know when we've either won or lost)?

Do we have the political will to win?

Do we have the military power to win?

The only one of these questions I think we can answer is the last one: we clearly have the military power, if we can just learn how to wield it smartly as part of a larger, clearly thought- out strategy that combines it with the other political and economic elements of our national power reach a clear political goal.

So the question remains: what do we call it? I suggest we go for the simple and direct approach.

Let's just call it "The War" until the President and his advisors figure out what it really is.

But don't hold your breath waiting for the answer.

Have a good day. More thoughts coming.

Bilbo

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