forsyth | A Sneaking Suspicion (Reply)

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.