There are many attitudes to the war on terror - for, against, 'hey, it shouldn't be called that', etc - but it sure does produce some mental confusion. The usually clear and perceptive Timothy Garton Ash has a column today the headline of which announces...
New York's war on terror is over...
It may not have been his own choice, but whether or not it was, his column tells you something different; it tells you that the war on terror is still on. Yet, whoever came up with the headline, the confusion is created by the writer himself. Garton Ash writes:
At the end of last month, Janet Napolitano, the US secretary for homeland security, confirmed that the Obama administration has junked the term "global war on terror". So, as a slogan, what was billed as an epochal struggle like the cold war... lasted little more than seven years, from the autumn of 2001 to the autumn of 2008, when Obama won the presidential election.
On the basis of the syntax, you might be forgiven for wondering whether it's the slogan or the struggle it referred to that has lasted so short a time. What comes next surely clears this up:
Obama has staked his reputation on success in Afghanistan, but the definition of success has been realistically downscaled. The goal is not a flourishing democracy, just a halfway stable state, which is not a haven or breeding ground for terrorists. Even in the United States, he can no longer depend on public support for this war.
It's a war, then, and its goal is to eliminate a breeding ground for terrorists. Further:
So there is a general and surely correct sense that a long-term struggle against diverse terrorists continues.
That initial ambiguity would appear to have been cleared up. Except that Garton Ash now goes into a coda in which our attention is drawn to there being other problems than terrorism: economic crisis; climate change, the rise of China. From this he concludes that 'the incremental struggle against terrorism' is only one issue 'and probably not the most important'. That there are these other issues is beyond question, but they are of doubtful relevance to the continued existence (or otherwise) of the war on terror. One is, after all, still one, even when it is only one among others. So the inaptness of that headline remains, despite the inner confusions of the piece.