Sorry for the light posting today, I’m finishing up a feature for the magazine, and I spent the morning at a New America panel on “reframing and rethinking the so-called ‘Global War on Terror.'” The panel was very good — as a general rule, if Daniel Levy and Flynt Leverett feel like talking, I feel like listening. But I’m a bit over this whole “Global War on Terror” debate. The past six years of disastrous policy-making have not emerged from an overly literal commitment to a metaphor. The metaphor has simple been one element in a broad range of political stratagems used to support a neo-conservative foreign — and at times, domestic — policy agenda. Were the slogan to dissolve, little would’ve changed.
Indeed, I think the “Global War on Terror” has been overwhelmed by Iraq. The surge is a much more common topic of conversation than the GWOT — and the one is rarely subsumed to the other. It’s simply too big. It’s too much it’s own thing. The apparent ease with which we swept Afghanistan made it a conceivable Step One in a larger process. The centrality of the quagmire in Iraq makes it the larger process all in itself.