PrintAugust 7, 2009
White House declares an end to the 'War on Terror'
We are no longer engaged in a "war on terror," according to Jon Ward and Eli Lake at the Washington Times. The White House has dropped all references to it and has substituted "war on al-Qaeda" instead.
It's official. The U.S. is no longer engaged in a "war on terrorism." Neither is it fighting "jihadists" or in a "global war." President Obama's top homeland security and counterterrorism official took all three terms off the table of acceptable words inside the White House during a speech Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
"The President does not describe this as a 'war on terrorism,'" said John Brennan, head of the White House homeland security office, who outlined a "new way of seeing" the fight against terrorism.
The only terminology that Mr. Brennan said the administration is using is that the U.S. is "at war with al Qaeda."
"We are at war with al Qaeda," he said. "We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al Qaeda's murderous agenda."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in March that the administration was not using the term "war on terror" but no specific directive had come from the White House itself. Mr. Obama himself used the term "war on terror" on Jan. 23, his fourth day as president, but has not used it since.
What's in a name, you might ask? For the same reason the Obama administration is dropping the term, the "war on terror" was adopted in the first place; to remind American citizens that we are fighting to prevent attacks like the one that occurred on American soil on 9/11.
Now Obama wants Americans to forget the past. The effort from now on will be to get at the "root causes" of terrorism, while going after the perpetrators of terrorist attacks as well as trying to stop them before they happen.
This is a losing strategy but the goal is not to win, according to Obama. It is to change the minds of radical muslims, and eliminate poverty and hopelessness in places that breed terrorists.
The fact that most terrorists are quite well educated and come from middle class families seems to have escaped our genius policy makers, who replaced the dumb ones under Bush who simply wanted to kill terrorists no matter whether they were rich or poor.
I'll let you decide which would be the better strategy.
Does this mean we are more likely to be attacked? As long as we continue to stop the terrorists before they act, we will be safe. But as it has been pointed out repeatedly, we have to be successful 100% of the time while the terrorists only have to be successful once.
And in my opinion, the chances of a terrorist group beating the odds just went up substantially.
