Obama Officially Retires 'War on Terror' ... But What is Taking Its Place?

Posted by Liliana Segura, AlterNet at 4:15 AM on March 26, 2009.

In its ongoing efforts to rework and rebrand the military missions it inherited from the Bush administration, the Obama White House has reportedly scrapped the phrase "war on terror," a term that the president has conspicuously avoided since taking office.

In a recently leaked e-mail to Pentagon staff, Dave Riedel of the Department of Defense's office of security review wrote: "This administration prefers to avoid using the term 'Long War' or 'Global War on Terror'" -- a message he asked recipients to "please pass on to your speech writers."
So what is the Obama administration replacing it with?

"Please use 'Overseas Contingency Operation,'" Reidel wrote.

It sounds a lot less sexy than "war on terror" (or, for that matter, the short-lived "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism" proposed by Bush officials a few years back); in fact, in military-speak, "overseas contingency operation" has been around for years.

"Overseas contingency operations is a very technical term that has been used for decades in connection with statutory operations," human rights attorney Scott Horton says. According to Horton (an expert in legal matters relating to armed conflicts), it is a catch-all phrase that refers to "military operations of any kind overseas." "It is plain vanilla, technical jargon that totally content neutral," he says.

In the conservative press and the right-wing blogoshpere, the term has been mocked as "vague and meaningless," a sign of a "weak-kneed" administration. Elsewhere, it has functioned more as a punchline: "Let's face it: 'Overseas Contingency Operation' does not exactly roll off the tongue," wrote a blogger on Newsweek's website. "Just as 'The artist formerly known as Prince' was always still 'Prince,' the 'war' will probably always be the 'war.'"

Indeed. Which is why it's worth remembering that, no matter what he calls it, Obama has little intention of declaring the mission formerly known as the "war on terror" accomplished anytime soon. In fact, officials from the Office of Management and Budget to the Pentagon have issued strong denials against claims that the phrase itself was officially banned. "I sometimes am amused by things that I read in the press," OMB director Peter Orszag said on Wednesday. "I am not aware of any communication that I've had on that topic." Likewise, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said he had "never received such a directive" and said "perhaps somebody within OMB may have been a little over-exuberant."

Name games aside, from his dubious Iraq withdrawal plan to escalation in Afghanistan to drone bombings in Pakistan, Obama has not just inherited Bush's "war on terror," he has embraced it -- just not with the same blunt belligerence of the Bush administration.

Politically, this is probably a smart move. "Obama consistently used the term 'war on terror' only to describe the policies of the old admistation," Horton points out. In fact, he says, the term "war on terror" was unpopular for years in the Bush administration -- the Joint Chiefs of Staff disliked the phrase from the jump. ("When you're the most paramount power in the world, you don't define war as something you could lose," says Horton.) "There was a consensus view at State and DoD to drop it," Horton says. But one person wanted it to keep for "domestic political purposes": Karl Rove.

With Americans long fed up with the propaganda and political manipulation that birthed the term "rovian," the fact that Obama appears to be eschewing such an intellectually dishonest frame -- one that was always shamelessly political -- must come as welcome news. "They're moving back to much more traditional ideas of war," says Horton. But, like the Obama administration's recent expunging of the Bush-era term "enemy combatants" to refer to prisoners at Guantanamo and Bagram (only to maintain its right to hold them indefinitely), such rebranding is of little practical use if it doesn't bring a real change in policy. "Overseas Contingency Operations" may not sound like the language of war, but it is just as broad and open-ended as a "war on terror" was.

"It could be a military exercise," says Horton. "It could be anything."

Tagged as: iraq, pentagon, afghanistan, war on terror, barack obama, pakistan, department of defense, overseas contingency oper

Liliana Segura is a staff writer and editor of AlterNet's Rights and Liberties and War on Iraq Special Coverage.