I was listening to a radio interview with a soldier's wife a couple weeks ago. She said that in the military community where she lives, people don't refer to "the Iraq war" or "the Afghanistan war." Instead, they call it all GWoT, the Global War on Terror.
As I think back over the events of the last six horrible years, it seems to me that that woman's perspective on events has been carefully formed and nurtured by the Bush administration. It has been a very effective job of framing. Imagine how much support you would find in polling this question:
Do you agree that the U.S. military should be in Iraq fighting terror?
Now imagine how much support you would find in polling this one:
Do you agree that the U.S. military should be in Iraq attempting to quell a Sunni/Shi'ite civil war?
One of the jobs, then of the new leadership in Washington should be to separate the various wars we are fighting and analyze them individually. This is not to deny that there are overlaps and linkages among the wars we're fighting now; there are, and they are important to understand. Still, branding all our conflicts under the Global War on Terror obscures more than it illuminates.
First, we are fighting a war in Iraq. Bush's real reasons for embarking on this war will be debated by future historians (and psychologists). From this vantage point, I think the point was to get rid of Saddam Hussein and to shake up the Middle East in hopes that its numerous problems could be more easily solved then. (Unlike some of my fellow liberals, I've never bought the we-wanted-their-oil argument.) Whatever the original objective, it seems that we are now on patrol in Baghdad and Anbar Province to attempt to stabilize the country so that the new Iraqi government can function.
Second, we are fighting a war in Afghanistan. Our original purpose there was to punish the Taliban government for harboring bin Laden. At this point, we are there to protect the new Afghan government against the return of the Taliban. It would be nice to think that we are also looking for bin Laden, but I just don't see much evidence of that.
And third, we are engaged in a struggle against al Qaeda and other radical Muslims who have chosen terrorism as a tactic by which to pursue their various goals. This is not a new kind of war; just ask the Irish, the Ceylonese, or the Spanish, to name but a few of the peoples that have been been engaged in and victimized by terror tactics for years.
The administration and its allies have attempted to group all three of these wars into one Global War on Terror. Joe Lieberman recently went on Meet the Press and, with a straight face, claimed that on 9/11, America was "attacked . . . by the same enemy that we’re fighting in Iraq today." This jibed nicely with the administration's longstanding characterization of the people we're fighting in Iraq as terrorists.
Framing these separate wars this way as all part of the same struggle is like the quintessential Microsoft bundling strategy. If you buy Windows, you have to get Media Player and Explorer. Gates & Co. have claimed that these components are mutually integrated; you can't get one without the others. This claim, however, has been debunked, and in a similar fashion, so should the claim that the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq and the struggle against Islamic radicals can be bundled together as the Global War on Terror. Those of us who oppose the Iraq war will find it easier to make our case if we can unbundle it from the other two. Any progressive who utters the phrase "war on terror" should have his mouth washed out with soap.
