Fighting Words

What you call things matters.  There is a reason why “nomen est omen” goes back as far as ancient Rome.  They of course believed that a person’s name determines (or at least reveals) fate, but more recently we have seen plenty of evidence of company or product names making a meaningful difference.  And anyone who has done user testing will know that what label you put on a button can significantly impact how often it will be clicked.

I was therefore happy to see that the Obama administration is getting rid of the expression “war on terror."   From when it was first introduced by the Bush administration, I thought it was a name that would misguide our efforts, much as has been the case for the "war on drugs."  A war is something you can fight when you have a clearly defined enemy with a territory, an army and a military objective (e.g., kicking the Iraqi army out of Kuwait in the first Gulf War).  Now terrorists and drug lords have lots of weapons and but they operate as dispersed networks, employ small groups of non-uniformed fighters and have monetary or religious/worldview objectives.  Framing the fight against them as a "war” starts thinking about strategy and tactics off on the wrong foot.

I was a bit aghast though to see a retreat from the word terrorism.  To me a “man-caused disaster” is when a dam that we built breaks by accident and floods a residential area.  If the same dam breaks because of a bomb than that’s “terrorism” (an act intended to instill terror, i.e. fear).  To refer to the latter as a “man-caused disaster” has a distinctly Orwellian feel to it.

So I will continue to call this what I have for a while, which is “Fight against Terror."  I believe it is terrorism that we are fighting and "fight” has been a successful term in another and closely related area, the “fight against crime.”