Thursday, April 5, 2007

Parsing Words in the Global War on Terror

Democrats in Congress have recently banned the phrase 'global war on terror' from appearing in legislation and have discouraged Democrats from using the phrase when speaking about terrorism.

A new internal memo by a senior Democratic staff member urged aides to drop the term ["global war on terror"] 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 (news, bio, voting record), R-Ohio. "How do Democrats expect America to fight and win a war they deny is even taking place?"
More.

Por qua? To put is simply, Americans overwhelmingly support the War on terror. When a particular crisis is associated with the war on terror, American support for intervening and resolving the incident is very high.

Ex. Fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan is considered by virtually everyone to be part of the global war on Terror. Support for the War in Afghanistan was very, very high.

Iraq is undeniably part of the global war on terror; however, the Democrats, with the help of the press, have successfully convinced the American public otherwise.

As soon as Iraq war was extricated from the global war on terror (never mind that it is universally accepted that Iraq was a state sponsor of international terrorism, Iraq supported Al Qaeda and Hamas, and Iraq's support of Al Qaeda was RECOGNIZED BY CONGRESS as a reason for authorizing war in Iraq the Iraq War Resolution Act)... let me start over. As soon as Iraq was extricated from the global war on terror - labeled a "grand diversion" and a "distraction" from the "real" war on terror - support for the Iraq war began to drop.

Why is this?

American people DO support the war on terror. Furthermore, American people trust the Republicans MORE than the Democrats in carrying out the war on terror.

Americans do not support going to war for no reason. We are a peace loving nation.

As soon as the left wingers were able to extract the Iraq war from the war on terror - instead labeling the Iraq was a "Bush's war" - the war no longer was understood as a matter of national security and instead became a war which could be attacked along partisan lines.

What is going on here is this: The war on terror is bad for Democrats, because the American people do not trust the Democrats to win the war on terror. The solution is to stop associating global terrorism as part of a global war on terror. When each incident is looked at as a single, solitary, unconnected attack - there is no need for the US to intervene and there is no need for Republican leadership to fight the global war on terror.

That's my analysis, anyway.

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