The War on What, Exactly?

At the end of August, George Bush admitted to host Matt Lauer of the Today show that he didn't think the United States could win the war on terror. John Kerry's campaign immediately countered that the war was of course winnable, accused the president of flip-flopping, and said Bush had sent the wrong message to America's enemies. The next day the president reversed course and forcefully asserted that the United States was winning the war and would prevail. To further confuse things, a week later Dick Cheney told a group of Iowans that if John Kerry were elected, America would slip back into a pre-9/11 mindset and treat future attacks as criminal acts instead of part of the broader war on terror. If voters made the wrong choice on Election Day, he warned, America was in danger of being hit by a devastating strike.

The stories received prominent play and were appropriately framed in the context of the election in a broad cross-section of papers, including The New York Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times. But there was little effort by the major newspapers or TV news operations to deal with the substance of these competing assessments of the war. Really, though, how could they have? What, after all, is the war on terror? It's certainly the war against al Qaeda. But is it the war in Iraq? Does the Israeli-Palestinian conflict qualify as a front? What about North Korea? For that matter, who are terrorists? Osama bin Laden surely counts. But how about Moktada al-Sadr's army? Or ETA, the Basque separatists? Or the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria? For that matter, what about the IRA?

Three years after the United States attacked Afghanistan, it is extremely difficult for the press to gauge where the United States stands in the war on terror because the term itself obscures distinction. Even a presidential campaign that turned largely on the war on terror failed to bring clarity. So now, two questions: How seriously did the press err in adopting the shorthand of the political establishment to describe America's response to 9/11? And, what should it do now that the terminology has been naturalized into the vernacular?

To answer those questions, it's worth revisiting the political tradition in which the phrase is rooted. War, the American philosopher William James argued, is "the only force that can discipline a whole community." As such, we declared metaphorical wars on social crises for much of the twentieth century. This kind of rhetoric made practical and political sense when used to spur the public to dedicate resources to cure diseases like polio and cancer. Things were messier, though, when a succession of presidents declared war against the less curable problems of poverty, crime, and drugs. Like the battles against disease, these wars focused the public's attention. But they were politically trickier because they were essentially endless. No president was ever going to wipe out crime or poverty. Moreover, they were waged against problems that are seated, to some degree, in behavior, which at times made it difficult to distinguish whom these wars were meant to defeat and whom they were supposed to help. The war on terror – which actually was declared first by the Reagan administration and used to justify an array of policies involving Nicaragua, Iran, and Libya – falls into this latter category.

Throughout the 1990s, the press treated the war on terror similarly to the war on crime and the war on drugs, more as a metaphor for the government's broad efforts to kill and prosecute terrorists than as a full-blown military campaign. Then on September 20, 2001, President Bush, in his defining address to Congress, recast the metaphor as a literal war. He painted in broad strokes. "Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda," he said, "but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated." The enemy he described was as amorphous as the war's scope. They were, he said, the heirs of Nazism and totalitarianism whose murderous ideology valued only power. They hated the American way of life, freedom, elections, and the press, and they intended to purge vast regions of the Middle East and Asia of Jews and Christians. He then bifurcated the world into two camps: those who were with the United States, and those who were with the terrorists. Beginning the following day, the American press wove "war on terror" into tens of thousands of news reports, features, and editorials to describe the logic for policies ranging from the Homeland Security Act to the Iraq war.