A War by Any Other Name

Is the “War on Terror” passé? Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has started to talk more about a “global struggle against violent extremists.” Terrorism experts, who for years have requested more nuanced language, are pleased. “It’s a recognition that the real challenge isn’t just capturing and killing the bad guys but breaking the cycle of recruitment and regeneration,” says the Rand Corporation’s Bruce Hoffman. “Better late than never.”

The U.S. has a long history of fighting wars on nouns. In the 1930s, F.D.R. fought a war on crime. Lyndon Johnson launched a war on poverty in 1964. In the ’70s, Richard Nixon started wars on cancer and, most memorably, on drugs. “The irony is that all of these wars on abstractions have pretty much been failures,” says Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard. “It’s a bit of a conceptual mismatch. If your roof leaks, you don’t have a war against rain.” Often those waging the wars request a name change. Drug czar Barry McCaffrey, who fought in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf, called the war metaphor “inadequate” for drugs in 1996: “This isn’t going to be won by anybody’s army.” Former State Department official David Long told the New York Times in 1998 that flu would be a better analogy for terrorism: “Every year there’s a new strain. You manage it. You’re not going to win the war on flu.”

But the notion of battling flu doesn’t make people want to join in song and sacrifice. So the challenge is to come up with a name that is more accurate than War on Terror but that doesn’t sound like a graduate-level seminar. During WW II, F.D.R. asked citizens for help and was inundated with suggestions–from the “Liberty War” to “Rat Killing.” Finally, he accepted that the conflict was, undeniably, another world war. Someday we may have to do the same. –By Amanda Ripley