Still new to the job, Adm. Michael Mullen, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has already made an interesting rhetorical shift.
Seems the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Michael Mullen, has banned the use of the phrase “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) and has prohibited using it “in any future correspondence,” according to a Sept. 27 e-mail from a Mullen aide.
Good move. It’s not all together clear what Mullen prefers as a title for our counter-terrorism efforts — I suppose it’s possible his label could be worse — but I’m inclined to consider this an encouraging sign.
Of course, if Bush’s hand-picked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff no longer believes in calling the conflict a “global war on terror,” I suppose the White House should stop condemning those of us who agree with Adm. Mullen about the utility (or lack thereof) of the label.
As Satyam noted, as recently as the summer, Bush argued, “This notion about how this isn’t a war on terror in my view is naive. It doesn’t reflect the true nature of the world in which we live, you know?”
Actually, what I do know is that if Adm. Mullen has banned use of the phrase “Global War on Terror,” and the White House and its political allies are fine with that, I can think of some Republicans who owe the rest of us an apology.
In April, the Democratic majority of the House Armed Services Committee said it would stop using the phrase “global war on terror,” as part an effort to “avoid using colloquialisms.” Congressional Republicans went berserk.
Democrats and Republicans are at odds on whether to use President Bush’s catchall phrase “global war on terrorism” when talking about the billions of dollars spent each year in Iraq and elsewhere.
A new internal memo by a senior Democratic staff member urged aides to drop the term from their legislative dictionaries because it was too broad. The directive quickly led to a linguistic dispute between the parties.
“The attempt by Democrats to erase the words ‘global’ and ‘terror’ from our current war is an absurd effort to deny the fact that America is battling terrorism on a global scale,” said House Republican leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. “How do Democrats expect America to fight and win a war they deny is even taking place?”
The RNC pushed the “story” aggressively, House Republicans released hard-hitting press releases, and far-right blogs expressed predictable outrage. To hear Boehner & Co. tell it, if Dems didn’t use the phrase “war on terror,” then they were denying the existence of counter-terrorism efforts. To suggest there’s something wrong with the phrase, the GOP said, is to suggest there’s something wrong with combatting terrorists.
I suppose it’s safe to assume, then, that Boehner, the White House, and the same conservatives who were whining bitterly in April will be equally forceful in condemning Mullen now?