ShareThisOne of Shakespeare's most famous lines appears in Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet says, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
That concept might well apply to roses, but does it apply to wars? Judging by the difficulty that both the Bush and Obama administrations have had in naming the conflict in which we currently find ourselves, Juliet's view seems to be exceptionally naïve.
President George Bush learned that lesson the hard way shortly after 9/11 when he warned the American public that, "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while." Critics immediately jumped on the president's choice of the term "crusade" to decry either his ignorance of or lack of sensitivity toward Muslims who consider the original Crusades to have been a barbarous attempt by Christians to reclaim the Holy Land by force, including Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam.
Missing was any outrage about Osama bin Laden's characterization of the current conflict as a "Jihad against Jews and Crusaders." Apparently, our use of "crusade" would precipitate a disastrous clash of cultures, but his use of the term would not.
The Bush administration eventually settled on the name "Global War on Terrorism," or GWOT, a term that has also proven to be problematic. Even those who generally support the war point out that terrorism is a tactic and that you can't wage war against a tactic.
Another school of critics holds that 9/11 was not an act of war but a horrendous crime that should be dealt with through the criminal justice system. Although the Obama administration has been sending mixed messages in this regard, it appears to be moving increasingly toward the law-enforcement model.
The term GWOT has quietly been dropped although no specific term has taken its place. Several administration officials have used the term "overseas contingency operation," a meaningless term at best, and the FBI has coined the term "global justice initiative" to describe its expanding role in the current conflict.
In the past, wars were often named for the principal opponents as in the Franco-Prussian, Spanish-American, or Russo-Japanese Wars. In some cases -- the Mexican War, for example -- the name identifies only the enemy. This approach has been deemed unacceptable by some officials who are afraid of even suggesting that our enemies have any connection whatsoever with Islam. That fear rules out any global war against Islamists, radical jihadists, Salafist extremists, or other similarly designated groups.
Another common approach has been to describe wars by when they were fought or by their length. The War of 1812 is an example. The Europeans frequently refer to World Wars I and II as the 1914-18 and 1939-45 Wars respectively, some say to remind Americans that we entered those wars late.
Others, including the Hundred Years' War and the Thirty Years' War, were named for their length. In 2004, Gen. John Abizaid, commander of the U.S. Central Command, coined the term "Long War" to explain what members of the military returning from multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan understood instinctively. The term was embraced by the Pentagon, but expunged by General Abizaid's successor, Adm. William Fallon, both to avoid offending cultural sensitivities in the Middle East and reminding the American public that we are engaged in -- imagine this -- a long war.
Wars have also been named for the territory in which they were fought. The Falklands (or Malvinas) War, the Gulf War, the Vietnam War are examples. For the most part, the names World War I and World War II are accurate descriptions of the geographical scope of those wars. Today's conflict is also global in scope, and some have suggested the terms World War III or IV depending on how you choose to characterize the Cold War.
The current conflict is not the first American war in which political considerations have prevented politicians from naming it accurately. When President Harry Truman committed U.S. forces to South Korea in 1950 in response to the North Korean invasion, he apparently felt constrained by war-related provisions in both the U.S. Constitution and the U.N. Charter. To accommodate those provisions, he initially referred to the fighting as a "police action," a term that infuriated the men under fire in Korea. The police action eventually became the Korean Conflict, which is now recognized as the Korean War.
Unfortunately, our enemies never seem to display the angst we do about giving their wars blatantly propagandist names. The North Koreans called the war "The Great Liberation War of the Korean People for Freedom and Independence," an ironic name at best from a government that has remained one of the most totalitarian on Earth.
Juliet may have been right when it comes to roses, but wars seem to be another matter. It is hard to believe that a nation that can't bring itself to name the war it is fighting accurately for fear of offending its enemies can nevertheless win that war. Maybe that's why President Obama recently said that he is "always worried about using the word 'victory' " in response to a question about Afghanistan.
Col. Theodore L. Gatchel (USMC, retired) is a military historian and a professor emeritus of operations at the Naval War College. The views here are his own. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com
Must credit The Providence Journal
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