Comments on: New Name. Same Aim.

By: Donklephant » Blog Archive » It’s Official: “War On Terror” Name Stays

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 15:06:40 +0000

[...] I applauded the Administration for trying to change the terminology in an early post about the war on terror, but the President doesn’t want it that way. I realize this may seem like a small deal to a lot of people, but in this specific case I really thinks the semantics of the situation matter. Declaring war on a tactic doesn’t not help our cause, and especially when it seems like many within the administration want to change it. [...]

By: Hunter McDaniel

Hunter McDaniel — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 19:11:08 +0000

We’ve had the Cold War recently and the Hundred Years War before that, so I don’t think the word ‘war’ is the problem. The real problem is characterizing the enemy we are fighting, without turning “global war on terror” into a paragraph.

Terrorism is a tactic, not the enemy per se. Movements that employ terrorism are generally inimical to us, but only AQ is an existential enemy.

AQ has Islamic roots and draws its support from within Islam, but it is counter-productive to reference Islam in naming the enemy, since we will require substantial Islamic support to defeat AQ.

By: Justin Gardner

Justin Gardner — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 16:15:14 +0000

I think if it were put that way, many nations across the world would think we’re wanting to say that Islam is the problem and not the extremists.

I still think the idea of fighting “violent extremism” will be better for us in the end because it has more potential to gain us more friends and sympathy, especially in the Islamic world. Just so long as we separate Islam itself from the extremists who use it to terrorize the world.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 15:36:20 +0000

An even better moniker would be “the global struggle against Islamic supremacism.”

This isn’t simply a case of the end not justifying the means. For al Qaeda and other Islamic supremacists, the end – a totalitarian Islamic world order – is evil in itself, regardless of the means used to advance it. Calling this a war on terror is like calling the Cold War a war against nuclear weapons.