The War that Shall Not Be Named

     As it is with children and projects of many kinds, so it is with wars. Success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan. One sign of a war with no understood purpose or meaning is the inability of its architects to agree on a name for it. In Israel, the Ministerial Committee for Symbols and Ceremonies was still arguing, six months after the fighting ended, about what to call the conflict: Hizbullah War, War of the North, Shield of the North War, or the Second Lebanon War. The decision finally was made to call it the Second Lebanon War.

     As our government tells us here in the United States almost every day, we are, now, "a nation at war." But what war? What is most commonly called the "War on Terror" has us in its grip, but its irrationalities have made it difficult for both its apologists and victims to be comfortable with its name. Afterall, can a war really be against "terror," that is against a symptom, or a human emotion, or a tactic? Sensing the distortions associated with fighting any sort of metaphorical War, our European allies, including the British, have always been more uncomfortable than Washington with this terminology. Indeed British law enforcement explicitly avoided use of the term "War on Terror" and criticized it as an obstacle to the pursuit of terrorist criminals and murderers. Ten days ago the British government formally declared it would stop using the phrase. In the United States, some years back, architects of the War on Terror, such as Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney tried hard to abandon the phrase. They urged appellations such as "the War against Islamic Extremism," "the War against Islamofascism," "the Global War on Terror (or Terrorism)," and "the Long War."

     All of these labels have been used, but President Bush's favorite, still, is the "War on Terror." Indeed he vetoed many of these other suggestions, either explicitly, or by his disinclination to use them in public. Some have wondered whether changing "War on Terror" to "War on Terrorism" created pronunciation difficulties too challenging for the President. But at least now we know that some substantive thinking about these matters is going on in the administration. Admiral William J. Fallon, recently appointed to head Central Command and to take primary responsibility, at least at this point, for whatever it is we are doing about terrorism world wide, announced that the phrase "The Long War" would be "retired." In a remarkable display of bipartisanship, the Democratic controlled Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives also declared that the phrase "The Long War" would not be allowed to appear in the defense appropriations bill. The Democrats also banned "War on Terrorism" and "Global War on Terrorism" from the vocabulary of the bill.

     Though they could say which names they did not like, neither the Admiral, nor the House Committee were able to suggest what the public should call the conflict. For the time being we might most appropriately call it "The War That Shall Not Be Named."