War Is Over!
Well, the War on Terror is over.
Well, actually, it’s just been renamed.
“Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism.” Nifty, ain’t it?
I’m sure that the Bush Administration doesn’t think anyone will notice and probably most of the sheep following blindly won’t notice.
I never thought they should have been calling it a war in the first place. A war suggests soldiers marching honorably off to war with women keeping the homefires burning. It suggests defined battlegrounds and strategies and even a defined enemy, generally having a central location so that we can eventually march in with great glory and free the oppressed. Wars even tend to suggest that there will be an end, that it’s somehow winnable by one of the sides, that a treaty or pact will eventually be agreed to and all the parties involved will slink back to their corners and try to play nice.
Terrorism doesn’t work that way. Funny that I never liked Star Trek: Next Gen, which may send Sci-Fi-ites storming my screen-door for my geek card back, but the one episode I remember from early on had to do with terrorism and the one thing that I got out of it is that no matter how many you kill, no matter how many you oppress, it just fuels the fire for creating more. Terrorism isn’t going to end because, quite frankly, everyone thinks they’re right and no one is going to give in, and lacking a government with a massive army and nuclear weapons to back them, this is how the “enemy” –er– violent extremists is going to continue fighting the “war” –er– struggle.
Oh, I liked this little quote from SeattlePi.com:
The U.S. government does not have a rich history of success when it calls one of its programs a “war” unless it involves a real military operation. We’ve had the “war on hunger,” “war on poverty,” “war on crime,” “war on obesity” and our all-time least-successful, “war on drugs.”
Excellent yet sadly amusing observation on their part.
Oh, and I also like the use of “Global” in the new struggle against violent extremists. It kind of makes it sound like we’re all united in the matter and by “all”, I don’t mean just us Americans, who can’t even agree on whether or not there were WMD in Iraq, but “all” as in the whole wide world — because you know how much most of the world loves us and stands behind us.
tags: War on Terror, terrorism
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on July 31, 2005 at 9:35 pm
Tamara said:
My theory is that the use of the word “extremists” just paves the way for the administration to start more publicly going after groups like Greenpeace and the ACLU, both of which the Feds are monitoring.
on August 1, 2005 at 9:55 am
n. mallory said:
That’s a good point. I wonder how long it’ll take before “violent” gets taken out of the phrase.