This story has been all over the place:

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.

     That quote is from the NYT, as is this one, which most piqued my interest:

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the
National Press Club on Monday that he had "objected to the use of the
term ‘war on terrorism’ before, because if you call it a war, then you
think of people in uniform as being the solution." He said the threat
instead should be defined as violent extremists, with the recognition
that "terror is the method they use."

     I have a clear memory from 9/12/01: The front page of the New York Daily News with a screaming headline: "It’s War!"  I remember thinking at the time: "no it’s not."  It is something awful and bloody and necessary, but it is not a war.  And my thinking at that time was very much like General Myers now: if you think of it as a war, you’ll think that the solution is primarily military.  If we have learned anything since 9/11, it is the response to those attacks, and the many attacks that have followed, cannot be simply or even primarily military.

     To have said that at the time, however, was to be branded an anti-American peace-nik who fundamentally misunderstood the nature of terrorism.  Thank you, General Myers and Secretary Rumsfeld and President Bush for setting the record straight now. 

     In any event, this also brings out my latent Taoist suspicions of the capacity of language to adequately capture the complexity of the world around us.  More on that below the fold…

UPDATE: Praktike is on this as well, pointing out that the shift away from "war on terrorism" may have begun earlier.

    Chuang Tzu may have been the most pointed in his skepticism toward language.  He basically rejected the very idea of drawing distinctions: "He who divides things, cannot see."  And analytic distinctions are prior to language: before we can name something, we need to have in our minds some idea of how to distinguish it from other things. 

    We do not have to be as linguistically radical as Chuang Tzu to recognize the inadequacy of a word like "war" to encompass all of what goes into a movement like Al-Qaeda.  It is a crude little word that forces our thinking into a narrow range of military options (apologies to Clausewitz who saw war as a broader range of options on an even wider continuum of politics).  When we call it "war" we do not think of "police activity."  Indeed, war-mongers have continually mocked those who have argued that going after Al-Qaeda is more like a crime-fighting problem than a war-fighting problem.  I guess General Myers will now be considered "soft" on terrorism, too.

    I am ranting here a bit (isn’t that what blogs are for?), but I want to bring it back to the bigger point: the problem is not branding or public relations sloganeering.  Changing the phrases we use to describe what we are trying to do will not solve the larger menace of Al-Qaeda.  Words matter, but they are always less than the reality they attempt to reflect.  "War" was always too restricted a word and we would be wise to expand our thinking beyond it.