Fake Plastic News

These guys are protecting us?

One question comes to mind while reading the New York Times' report today that the Bush administration has decided to change the name of its counterterrorist campaign from "the global war on terrorism" to "the global struggle against violent extremism": Are these guys really this clueless?

What else to make of the story's opening sentence:

The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday.

Three subquestions arise just from the lead. First, this is the administration's solution to the spike in terrorist incidents, the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan, and the politico-military deterioration in Iraq to retool the slogan?

Second, the White House and the Pentagon are just now coming around to the idea that the struggle is as much ideological as military? This wasn't obvious, say, three or four years ago?
Apparently not. Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, the Times reporters who co-authored the article, note:

Administration and Pentagon officials say the revamped campaign has grown out of meetings of President Bush's senior national security advisers that began in January, and it reflects the evolution in Mr. Bush's own thinking nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

It took four years for the president of the United States to realize that fighting terrorism has a political component? It took six months for his senior advisers to retool a slogan? We are witnessing that rare occasion when the phrase "I don't know whether to laugh or cry" can be uttered without lapsing into cliche.

But the shallowness gets deeper still. The Times story doesn't notice what appears to be the driving force behind the new slogan a desire for a happier acronym.

Look at the first letters of Global War on Terrorism. GWOT. What does that mean; how is it pronounced? Gwot? Too frivolously rowdy, like a fight scene in a Marvel comic book (Bam! Pfooff! Gwot!). Gee-wot? Sounds like a garbled question (Gee what?).

Then look at Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. Its acronym is GSAVE i.e., gee-save. We're out to save the world, see, not wage war on it. Or, as national security adviser Stephen Hadley puts it in the Times piece, "We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative."

Unbelievableable! I can just picture Bush and Rumsfeld sitting in the Oval Office, bouncing slogan acronyms off each other, and crossing off names of terrorists that have been caught, thinking this battle will be over with a few more bad guys caught, and a nifty catch phrase in use.

Oh, and John Kerry was right!

Update 7/27 4:15PM: Now that there's a new slogan, does the War in Iraq still qualify as the main front in the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism? Hussein was a terrible and brutal dictator, but wouldn't we call the Mullah's in Iran the real extremists? Or perhaps, is the resurging Taliban in Afghanistan the main front?