Rhetorical Change

[StPetersburgHoya (Inactive)]

News media outlets have begun to pick up on a rhetorical shift in the Bush administration from calling the post-9/11 military and law enforcement actions against terrorist organizations "the war on terror" to "the struggle against violent extremism". Seems less specific to me. But what exactly does it signify?

I think the most interesting shift is the deletion of the word "war" which is something tangible that you can either win or loose against a defined enemy. "Struggle" is a much vauger word that can describe everything from a scuffle after you've had a few too many Tombs Ales to Korea.

[CTHoya08]

Just because it doesn't get as much attention as World War Two or Vietnam does not mean Korea was not a war. It was a war. Not a "struggle" or "conflict" or "operation". I don't want to completely change the topic of your thread, but the labeling of the Korean War as anything less than a "real" war is very insulting to the thousands of veterans who fought in Korea in between 1950 and 1953.

[StPetersburgHoya (Inactive)]

That's clearly not what I meant. It is a war that is also misladeled - making it the top end of what has been inacurately described as a struggle - because at the time it was not geopolitically expedient for us to refer to Korea as a war because it was faught under the auspices of the United Nations - which is an organization committed to the traditions of Kellog-Briand's rather pie-in-the-sky statement on the "outlawery of war". I understand that its a touchy issue, but my point was that we often use terms in the course of politics inaccurately. What is a "war" on drugs or poverty or any other social ill? And how can one describe open combat using all of the modern technological means of implementing destruction as a "police action" or "struggle". I was just pointing out that the rhetorical quibbling on the part of the administration has real consequences.