A Sneaking Suspicion

[forsyth]

It's an idea that's been growing for a while, but I think one of the first and biggest mistakes we made in the "war on terror" was to call it "the war on terror". And by us, I mean the Bush administration. See, the thing about war is, you can't have a war unless there's two sides of at least relatively similar strength. Which is clearly not the case here. But by making it the "war on terror", it a) conflated a bunch of terrorist groups into some kind of monolithic enemy "the terrorists" that doesn't actually exist, and b) it made "The terrorists" something the world's mightiest superpower considered close enough to its own strength to declare war on. Instead of treating these guys as a bunch of scumbags who blow up innocent people to try and bully their way around. And since there's not any kind of unified group of terrorists, no SPECTRE or anything, it's a war we can't "win" or show major victories in, which means that we set the metaphors up to favor "the terrorists".

We're fighting the ideas part of things on ground that sucks for us, and the Bush Administration CHOSE that ground. One more little incompetency from them.

Comments

[frustratedpilot]

You think something as silly as "efficacy" or "competance" had anything to do with it?

Two ways to see it, that may or may not be mutually exclusive:

1) The Republican leadership are evil geniuses, and willfully allowed a crisis to happen so as to have an excuse for a power grab, undermining the balancing powers of the judiciary and the legislative branch in favor of the executive branch...with the added benefit of getting vengeance on Saddam Hussein, who so ably survived where the previous Bush failed (politically);

2) Bush and Cheney are utter morons, gulled by circumstance AND their own illusions of moral superiority.

If this were in fact a "War on Terror", our nation wouldn't just be fighting in Iraq and Afganistan, we'd have forces in action in Sudan and Nepal and Sri Lanka and all sorts of other places. Defining our enemies as "terrorists" doesn't work, nor calling them "Jihadists" (which Muslims think of as a heroic term). National Public Radio recently went into great detail about the problems of terminology associated with the situation.

If this were a "war", our nation would be taking ECONOMIC measures to support it. In the World Wars, the public was encouraged to take on the burden of the National debt through the purchase of savings bonds. The government and the media went to great pains to promote the idea of the citizens directly supporting the war effort in this fashion. We don't see anything like that now. Nor do we see any great effort to RECRUIT new people into the military like there was in wars past. Or to promote our defense infrastructure and industries. No, this is NOT a war. This is a farce. We deserve to "lose".