Arrogance, Obstinacy and the War on Terror

Doesn’t President Bush’s stance in refuting some of his top officials, who have called for clarity in describing what we are doing now with regard to terrorism and its bedfellows, just seem emblematic of a level of stubbornness and arrogance that turns so many people off? Was this necessary? Is the administration that determined to be right, and to present a monolithic front, that the very assertion of a different view of foreign affairs stands as apostasy?

“Make no mistake about it,” lectures the Commander in Chief, “We are at war.” Yes, we are. And not one of your advisors has denied as much, nor have they asserted that we should be anything other than aggressive in finding those who would destroy us and one way or the other bringing them to justice. But just as a concept, “war on terrorism” is incredibly sloppy. This is another example of where the president’s tendency to see the world in simple, indeed simplistic, syllogisms does not work. We must work to fight terrorism wherever we encounter it. But simply declaring war against every conceptual noun that you dislike does not a foreign policy make.

And don’t get me wrong – the choice of language that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and some of his staff have adopted, the “Global struggle against violent extremism," is a barbarous turn of phrase that on every level is an affront to the language. But even so, it gives a better sense of what we are up against than “war on terror” and indicates that at the highest levels of our foreign policy and military apparatus we are struggling not only to come up with descriptions and labels that are accurate, we are also doing the more important work of really trying to understand the new dangers that we face. These are not semantic struggles. Or they are not merely that. The President’s obstinacy here is indicative of the larger problems that many of us who are liberals but also hawks have with this administration.