Judith Miller

In response to John Brennan’s recent speech laying out the administration’s strategy for fighting terrorists, Jon Ward of The Washington Times has astutely noted the “semantic shift” in how Obama intends to talk terror. The result is a ban on several post-9/11 household phrases. Banished is the “war on terror,” because, Brennan argued, terrorism is merely a tactic, not an end in itself. And say goodbye to those “jihadists,” or holy warriors, which reinforces the idea that the U.S. “is somehow at war with Islam itself.” Finally, adieu to “global war,” which feeds al Qaeda’s vision of itself as a “highly organized, global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate.” Ward quotes a former Bush counterterrorism adviser who calls the semantic shift a “straw man.” The issue, he says, is not what Obama calls his approach, but what he does. Ward notes that Obama has continued many Bush-era counterterrorism policies—extraordinary rendition (speaking of euphemisms), the war in Afghanistan, and drone attacks in Pakistan, to name but a few.