Fred Kaplan has an excellent article on
Slate in which he responds to the President's proposed shift in the war on terror. Kaplan is almost always dead-on in his writing about military affairs, and this essay is one of his best.
According to the
NYTimes piece that Kaplan responds to, the Administration is "retooling" its war on terror to better reflect its own thinking about the struggle we're engaged in. Apparenty, in the years since 9/11 Bush and his staff have come to the conclusion that terrorism "is as much an ideological battle as a military mission." They want a new slogan that captures not just the nasty stuff about the war on terror--bombs dropping the heavens, late-night raids, unwarranted search and seizure, extraordinary rendition, torture, etc.--but some of the good stuff as well, like saving the world for democracy and stopping extremism. (Here one is left to assume that they don't think of themselves as extremists.) What is their plan? Set aside the phrase "global war on terror" in favor of the more expansive "global struggle against violent extremism," or G-SAVE.
Kaplan's attack on this PR bullshit is rightly harsh. The essay is worth forwarding to friends who are on the fence about Bush, since it sums up perfectly what has been Bush's strategy all along: hire consultants like Frank Luntz to design a clever media campaign against terrorism, all the while ignoring real strategies of fighting terror and making the world less safe for everybody.
Now that I think about it, Democrats should join in on this effort to rebrand the war on terror. They should persistently refer to these last 5 years as the "Media War on Terror", and they ought to doggedly contrast it with the real war on terror that they would begin.
[ED 14:33] I fixed a typo and highlighted poll for extra thrills