After GWOT, What?

Al says, "The problem always has been: what do you replace GWOT with? Rumsfeld tried to change it to GSAVE, which is probably a better phrase. I think Matthew mocked him for it."

I disagree. The difficulty with finding an apt replacemen for GWOT highlights the inaptness of the term. The reason nobody can come up with a good name for the thing "GWOT" is supposed to denote is that it doesn't denote anything. Instead, insofar is it isn't merely a piece of goofy rhetoric (and I think John Edwards went a bit too far in suggesting this is all it is) it's a conceptual confusion -- an effort to lump together a bunch of loosely-related issues that 9/11 all happened to highlight and turn them into a single "thing" even though there's nothing there.

To take an example, a lot of critiques of "GWOT" begin by noting that "terrorism is a tactic, and you don't go to war with a tactic." Which is true. At the same time, while on the one hand 9/11 highlighted a specific problem with a specific enemy, it also did highlight America's vulnerability to the generic tactic of terrorism. Something like "we should harden cockpit doors" isn't part of a "war on Islamic fundamentalism" (or whatever more precise term you might like) it's a counterterrorism measure just like the longstanding practice of using metal detectors is.

So there's a specific al-Qaeda issue (we're not going to invest tons of effort into crushing ETA). Then there's a general terrorism issue (we do want to reduce our generic vulnerability from any group that may arise in the future). Then there are the geopolitics of the Middle East. Then there's the issue of nuclear proliferation. These questions are relate, but there's not a single thing that should have a single name. There's fighting al-Qaeda, there's counterterrorism, there's the Middle East, there's non-proliferation -- those are all good words. "War on Terror" should just be demoted to the status of somewhat silly name for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.

Comments

A healthy dose of blue, underlined common sense there Matt, but it may get lost in its blue underlinededness.

Posted by Njorl | May 8, 2007 11:08 AM

Underlining makes this too difficlt to read easily.

Posted by Jennifer | May 8, 2007 11:09 AM

It does distract from the typos, though. Very clever, Matt.

Posted by Glenn | May 8, 2007 11:10 AM

to turn to the substance for a moment, it's certainly true (and i said so way back then) that the correct focus in the wake of 9/11 was to "break the back of islamic jihadist fundamentalism" while simultaneously increasing our overall attention to the problem of terrorism.

sadly, though, it's may of 2007: the war on terror has become embedded in the vocabulary of political discourse, and i don't see it going away, no matter how meaningless a phrase it is.

Posted by howard | May 8, 2007 11:22 AM

Matt, buddy, validate your HTML before you post.

Posted by dob | May 8, 2007 11:25 AM

"Instead, insofar is it isn't merely a piece of goofy rhetoric (and I think John Edwards went a bit too far in suggesting this is all it is) it's a conceptual confusion -- an effort to lump together a bunch of loosely-related issues that 9/11 all happened to highlight and turn them into a single "thing" even though there's nothing there."

Wha?

First Kagan pretends Obama agrees with him when he doesn't, and now you pretend Edwards disagrees with you when he doesn't.

Edwards, previewing the foreign policy he will unveil in coming weeks, made it clear that his objections to Bush's world view are not merely semantic. Indeed, the Edwards foreign policy will be built around a rejection of the Bush doctrine, which puts a primary emphasis on the projection of American military power.

And

"This political language has created a frame that is not accurate and that Bush and his gang have used to justify anything they want to do," Edwards said in a phone interview from Everett, Wash. "It's been used to justify a whole series of things that are not justifiable, ranging from the war in Iraq, to torture, to violation of the civil liberties of Americans, to illegal spying on Americans. Anyone who speaks out against these things is treated as unpatriotic. I also think it suggests that there's a fixed enemy that we can defeat with just a military campaign. I just don't think that's true."

Posted by Petey | May 8, 2007 11:50 AM

I disagree, howard. If a Democratic President is elected in '08 who chooses not to continue using the phrase "war on terrorism", then it will stop being part of our vocabulary (with the exception of Republicans trying desperately to drag the country back to 2002).

I suggest we just call the collection of foreign policy issues Matt refers to by the phrase "national security" instead of "war on..." anything.

As a side note, calling a policy "war on..." seems to ensure its failure (War on Drugs, War on Poverty, War on Terrorism....). You'd think at some point politicians would shy away from that linguistic device.

Posted by Ron | May 8, 2007 11:55 AM

Initially, I thought it was just conceptual confusion. But the Bushies had a purpose behind the "war" name -- they wanted to establish the kind of all-encompassing executive power that would be granted in a real war, without the specifiable time limits real wars have.

Posted by Pithlord | May 8, 2007 12:00 PM

Petey: Matt and Edwards aren't saying the same thing at all. Edwards is saying that the purpose of the phrase is to be a rhetorical tool to beat up on democrats and to justify bad things. Matt is saying, yes that may be one of the purposes (and is clearly an effect), but the phrase also reflects an actual misunderstanding of the issue. It's not just about framing but also about bad policy analysis.

Posted by Led | May 8, 2007 12:00 PM

"Petey: Matt and Edwards aren't saying the same thing at all."

What I was disputing was Matt's specific Edwards reference:

it isn't merely a piece of goofy rhetoric (and I think John Edwards went a bit too far in suggesting this is all it is) it's a conceptual confusion

I think, as my quote upthread shows, that Edwards is clearly not saying it's merely a piece of goofy rhetoric. He's not saying it's merely a matter of changing the acronym. He is saying that it's a conceptual confusion.

Posted by Petey | May 8, 2007 12:18 PM

I don't disagree that disaggregating the concepts makes for maore precise discussion. And yet I have a few problems with such a disaggregation.

First, just on a rhetorical level, I don't think it works well. Matthew even concedes that the concepts are loosely related. It is not always feasible to disaggregate the concepts when you are making a short statement, and it is handy to have one term for this grouping of loosiely related concepts. In that, the term GWOT does more good than harm.

Secondly, I think Matthew's disaggregation misses some important points. The war is NOT just against al Qaeda. By defining it so narrowly, you miss, e.g., Abu Sayyaf, and the Khobar Towers bombing. You really need to have something that encompasses ALL violent extremists targeting America. Now, to some extent, al Qaeda has diffused to an extent such that discussing it means discussing Abu Sayyaf. But I think that that the way Matthew narrows the issue does more harm than good. I don't know that these are the "general terrorism issue" Matthew also mentions, but they are more concrete than "our generic vulnerability from any group that may arise in the future". Moreover, discussing "the geopolitics of the Middle East" is nebulous. Our interest in the goverance of Somalia is one thing, but our interest in ensuring that groups don't use Somalia as a terrorist haven is something else. To the extent we need to focus on one or the other, I'd focus on the latter.

Posted by Al | May 8, 2007 12:23 PM

'War' is the governing word. Using the word war makes people thing you are serious. "This is War!" It also allows governments to 'commandeer'. Take things that don't belong to them like rights, control and such. Police investigations recently have prevented a few large conspiracies, aiport fluid bomb, recent british cabal, and just this am the Fort Dix plot. It's just so unsexy; Police investigations....

Posted by judson | May 8, 2007 12:25 PM

You really need to have something that encompasses ALL violent extremists targeting America.

No, you don't. Osama bin Laden has very little to do with Eric Rudolph; neither have very much in common with the late Saddam Hussein or the North Korean regime.

Your desire to lump all these different things together under one lable and find some sort of universal solution is an obstacle to addressing these issues effectively.

Posted by rea | May 8, 2007 12:29 PM

WHY does no one want to address the PRIMARY issues -- the major problems with Bush's GWOT??

1) How do you make the USA immune to foreign terrorists without gradually turning it into a heavily fortified, totalitarian government in which a small minority seizes all wealth and defends itself from rebellion by a large, impoverished, enslaved populace?

After all, the Orwellian-named Patriot Act defines terrorism as " "activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the U.S. or of any state, that (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping, and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S."

By that definition the Founding Fathers were Terrorists. As would be the membership of the NRA if they ever had the balls to act on their rhetoric.

2) How do you prevent powerful elites from exploiting the GWOT for their own purposes-- by using the closely held mass media to relentlessly lie to/deceive the American voters?

Why, for example, has no one --including the 911 Commission -- told America that Bush was lying when he said that Sept 11 occurred "because they hate our freedom". That Bin Laden in 1998 cited 3 major reasons why the Islamic world would need to wage war on the US government. That Sept 11 was provoked by special interests promoting their
goals at the expense of the American national interest.

3) Why did no one in the Democratic leadership warn the country that Bush/Cheney was misusing GWOT to seize the oil reservoirs of Iraq -- and to court billionaire financiers of the Democratic Party by casting the invasion of Iraq as protection of Israel.

4) Why is the Bush Administration a far worst enemy to the American people than Al Qaeda could ever hope to be?

Has Al Qaeda sent 3000 of our sons to die in Iraq?

Has Al Qaeda stolen $4 TRILLION from our Social Security/Medicare accounts?

Is it the behavior of Al Qaeda that is enraging 1 billion Muslims -- and turning some of them into terrorists who bitterly hate America--with cause?

Was it Al Qaeda who destroyed several of our most precious civil rights with deceitful legal sophistry? Who destroyed Habeas corpus, the right to trial by jury, the ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the ban on illegal search and seizures absent a warrent from a judge?

Is it Al Qaeda that takes $500 BILLION from us every year to protect a global empire that profits a few while impovishing most Americans?

5) This is why so many people refuse to vote for Democrats. We claim to be on the side of common citizens -- but we are such contemptible, pathetic pussies when it comes time to speak up on behalf of those common citizens.

Why depend on a representative who will ALWAYS sell you out whenever it is convenient?

Who NEVER shows true allegiance to the ideals it constantly proclaims?

Posted by Don Williams | May 8, 2007 12:29 PM

Ron, i'd like to believe you're right, but first, that would require a democrat to get elected who actually eschews use of "war on terror" and second, it would require the media to ask pointed questions of those republicans who still use the term as to what the hell they mean by it, and third, it would require that we not see another domestic terrorist attack by foreign-based jihadists.

that's a trifecta i'm not expecting.

Posted by howard | May 8, 2007 1:06 PM

Because a certain class of activities might be only loosely related does not mean that no term can denote this class of activities. Nor is the fact that we might have a ragged conception of what belongs to a designated class of activities a sufficient reason for holding that some specified name fails to denote that class. If it were a sufficient reason, then we would have to say that virtually no natural language name denotes anything.

The expression "The Global War on Terror" is by now just a name - its not a definite description. It might be a bad name, with misleading connotations, but it is a name all the same. To say that name has no denotation is like saying, in 1970, that "The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" has no denotation because the entities in question are not genuinely soviet, are not genuinely socialist and are not genuinely republics. A candidate who denied the existence of the Soviet Union because he really wanted to make a point about the misleading connotations of that well-established name, would be acting foolishly.

I really don't think the denotation of the name "Global War on Terror" is all that foggy. It is used in common discourse these days to refer collectively to counterterrorism operations directed specifically at militant jihadist groups and individuals. The use of this label is actually fairly consistent. No doubt, again, it is a poor name. It would have been better, perhaps, to refer to the effort as the "The Global Anti-jihadist Counterterrorism Effort", or something similar. But unfortunately, that is not the name that was given to the effort. Arguing "well, it's not really a war," or "it's not directed against all terrorism" is a lame way of defending the idea that the name doesn't really stand for anything.

Some leaders may err gravely in thinking that a certain foreign war is properly regarded as a positive contribution to the global anti-jihadist counterterrorism effort, and in misunderstanding the causal connections, and lack of causal connection between the two activities. That also is no reason to say that the effort does not exist, or that "The Global War on Terrorism" is not its name.

It may also be true that the significance of the Global War on Terror has been grossly overrated, and is not nearly so cosmic and generation-defining as its propagandists would have us believe. That is also no reason for saying that The Global War on Terror does not exist.

Posted by Dan Kervick | May 8, 2007 1:32 PM

"TWAT", i.e. The War Against Terror seems apt.

Posted by Tokyo Sexwale | May 8, 2007 1:41 PM

We've all heard the ticking bomb scenario to justify the use of torture. Well, invoke the war on terror, and voila! torture gets its imprimatur. (There's been plenty of torture and yet no ticking bombs to be defused.) The need to react swiftly regarding terror produces a general assertion that the Unitary Executive (pompous rhetoric is always a tip off to shenaningans) needn't obey any law regarding searches. Goombye 4th Amendment.

And on and on and on.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | May 8, 2007 2:02 PM

The reason nobody can come up with a good name for the thing "GWOT" is supposed to denote is that it doesn't denote anything.

This misses the point, I think. The GWOT is not a term that is meaningless, or comes out of some sort of random confusion. There’s a very specific worldview and ideology behind the coinage of the term ‘GWOT’: that Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks were just a symptom of the larger scourge of 'radical Islam', and that the rise of radical Islam was primarily rooted in the political failures of the autocratic regimes of the Middle East. Thus the effort to prevent another 9/11 required not just an attack against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but a larger effort to overthrow existing regimes in the Middle East.

The neocons wanted to overthrow Saddam long before 9/11 ever happened. But the ideology of the GWOT allowed them to justify it as part of the effort to prevent another 9/11. Kind of like how the ‘starve the beast’ theory allowed conservatives to justify irresponsible tax cuts and deficit spending in the name of smaller government.

Posted by RC | May 8, 2007 2:44 PM

Everyone knows what the "Global War On Terror" means, and it sure as hell isn't actually a war on terrorism--otherwise counterterrorism issues like hardening cockpit doors, nuclear proliferation, etc. would get a lot more play in national discourse. But they don't, because the GWOT isn't about that--it's a metaphor for fighting Islamic fundamentalism or Islamofascism. As a rhetorical device "GWOT" has so many very useful connotations, though. It sounds better, so we use it.

In terms of strategy and not semantics, I don't think there's anything wrong with something like this: You have people becoming Islamic fundamentalists, all around the world, alone or in established networks, seeking to attack the United States (and other countries) the only way they can--through terrorism--by car bombs or whatever weapons they can acquire, potentially WMD. These people are a large threat to the United States (and other countries). The strategy--the "War on Terror"--is to disrupt this pipeline at every step. Police actions and detective work are important. But ultimately what is necessary is to stop the source, which is the conditions and idealogy that is enabling terrorist networks to flourish. That means things like pushing Middle East reform, moving the world away from an oil-based economy, working on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, etc.

Now you could probably replace "GWOT" with some other phrase, with some effort. I think the 9/11 Commission endorsed "War on Islamic Fundamentalism," and you could think up all sorts of other phrases. But replacing "GWOT" with nothing? Not going to happen.

Posted by Korha | May 8, 2007 2:44 PM

I thought "War on Islamic Fundamentalism" was a terrible, terrible phrase. Even worse than GWOT, because it would actually aid enemy propaganda.

Posted by AlanC9 | May 8, 2007 3:19 PM

Re Korha's comment "These people are a large threat to the United States (and other countries). The strategy--the "War on Terror"--is to disrupt this pipeline at every step. Police actions and detective work are important. But ultimately what is necessary is to stop the source, which is the conditions and idealogy that is enabling terrorist networks to flourish"
-----------

1) The "conditions" that are enabling terrorist networks to flourish are the acts of US special interests.

The fact the neither the Bush Administration, the Republicans nor the Democrats will TRUTHFULLY discuss what caused Sept 11 shows that our elites are not really intent on protecting the USA and its citizens -- only on protecting their patrons
and campaign donors.

2) Because of the deceit of the people who run our mass media, the American people may be the most ignorant people on the planet -- but the people of the Islamic world are not.

They know that the US government under Clinton killed almost 600,000 children by bombing Iraqi water plants in 1991 and then blocking the import of water purification chemicals --causing pandemics of Cholera,etc.

They know that when Ariel Sharon bombed apartment buildings in Gaza at night and killed children that the killing is intentional --that Gaza is the most densely populated place on earth. They know the US government --whore of the Israel lobby -- gave Sharon those F16s and bombs. That Bush gave Sharon 52 more in June 2001.

They know that the US government --whore of the Oil companies -- have propped up Middle Eastern tyrannies for decades so that Houston could loot the Middle East. They know that Dick Cheney has never preached the joys of Democracy in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Azerbaijan, or Kazakhstan.

3) There is a hard core cadre within Al Qaeda that will never make peace --no matter what we do -- and it is a war between us and them. But the way to find that hard core was to have done something to address the real grievances that the Islamic world has against the US government. IF the Islamic world sees us as friends --or at least as neutral businessmen -- then it will deal with its extremists or tell us where they are.

The acts of the US Government which create such hatred in the Middle East are NOT in the interest of the people of the United States.

There's no reason we should care what happens to Israel if Israel continues to screw the Palestinians.

There's no reason we should support the House of Saud. We are currently paying almost $9 /gallon for Saudi gasoline -- $3 at the pump and $6 in military operations to keep things going. That is CONSUMPTION that has to be spent every year. A fraction of that money INVESTED in alternatives would leave the USA far better off. But if you put the EXXON CEO in charge of developing those alternatives, you shouldn't hold your breath waiting for them.

4) This shows the deep hole the Democrats have dug for themselves. Due to the influence of the Israel Lobby, they went along with the lie that Bush/Cheney constructed after Sept 11.

Now they are trapped into supporting that lie --
its too late to admit the truth because if you admit the truth you are complicit in the deaths of 6000+ Americans. So the Democratic leadership is reduced to incoherent ramblings that they hope will give the impression of opposition without actually doing anything.

Posted by Don Williams | May 8, 2007 3:52 PM

Too weird. The 'Al' at K Drum's site is obviously not the same 'Al' that we find here. 'Al' has become the internet equivalent of Elvis impersonators.

Kilroy would be envious, if he were here.

Posted by serial catowner | May 8, 2007 7:18 PM

"Too weird. The 'Al' at K Drum's site is obviously not the same 'Al' that we find here."

There's a 'fake Al' over there that folks tend to discourage here.

Whoever did it had an idea that was immensely funny for about a week, and then didn't realize the expiration date had come and gone.

Posted by Petey | May 8, 2007 7:22 PM

As for Dan Kervick, baloney.

The US supports terrorist groups in Iran, and recently provided a soft landing in the US for a South American terrorist who was responsible for blowing up an airliner.

You can't have it both ways, and the US has been paying terrorists so long we need to see the evidence before we believe the US government has changed its ways.

The GWOT is just an excuse to give the military authority over a bunch of stuff other agencies should be doing, but can't, usually because they are dominated by the industries they are supposed to oversee and regulate.

The military will continue to screw up and not do this work, but they offer a guarantee- in case of failure, they'll kill someone. Probably not someone associated with the problem, but hey, you can't have everything.

Posted by serial catowner | May 8, 2007 7:29 PM

This is really War on Terror II.

Reagan declared the first one early on in his presidency. He basically made a scapegoat out of Libya, murdered some folk, pretended that fixed everything. Probably the final act was hiring a group of terrorists to try and kill Nasrallah in Beirut and they blew up half a city block killing most of a girls school.

The script is the same just writ larger today.

Posted by Ed Marshall | May 8, 2007 7:56 PM

The term "Global War on Terror" allows the 101st fighting keyboarders to feel like they are fighting a war.
Without doing something like enlisting and actually fighting.

Posted by merlallen | May 9, 2007 3:31 AM