Pithy, Pithy

John Edwards joins Zbigniew Brzezinski and assorted other luminaries in criticizing the phrase “War on Terror.”

“This political language has created a frame that is not accurate and that Bush and his gang have used to justify anything they want to do,” Edwards said in a phone interview from Everett, Wash. “It’s been used to justify a whole series of things that are not justifiable, ranging from the war in Iraq, to torture, to violation of the civil liberties of Americans, to illegal spying on Americans. Anyone who speaks out against these things is treated as unpatriotic. I also think it suggests that there’s a fixed enemy that we can defeat with just a military campaign. I just don’t think that’s true.”

Pretty hard to really disagree with that assessment.  “War on terror” implies one enemy, portrays the struggle as against an abstraction, and suggests that the conflict we’re engaged in is best resolved through hard power, all of which are highly problematic assumptions at best.

Like it or not, people want some sort of convenient shorthand for the interrelated network of foreign policy endeavors we’re going to be concentrating on for awhile.  Bush and various Democrats have tried substitutes for “war on terror”–remember the halcyon days of “Islamofascism?”–which haven’t stuck, and I have a feeling that Giuliani’s bold strategy of replacing a stupid term with something far, far dumber won’t quite stick:

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani tells TIME that the phrase “served its purpose for awhile” but should now be superseded. “I have been referring to it for quite some time as ‘the terrorist war against us’ – not just America, but people who think like we do, basically the ideas of modern democracy,” Giuliani said. “In order to deal with the terrorists’ global war on us, we have to be on offense.”

Yeah, pretty insightful, and also a little frightening, if you think about what ‘being on offense’ is likely to mean in a hopefully-hypothetical Giuliani administration.

Anyway, even if, as the author of the TIME article says, we’re going to have to live with the term ‘war on terror’ for awhile no matter what Edwards or anyone says or does, I do like this move from Edwards quite a bit.  It’s meant to sum up a real break from Bush, not the meaningful and substantive policy differences that all Democrats and some Republicans have, but a really nice bit of political shorthand which says effectively, “I reject all of the assumptions that have gone into our failed policies of the past administration.”  Moving on from Iraq and trying to restore America’s place in the world are of course great and necessary things, but the real problem’s the mindset–the war-on-terror-ism, if you will.

He just better get some better foreign policy advisors.