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By Root 1052 0

case of learning on the job—for examples of how to combat insurgents in contemporary Iraq. Even the term ‘emergency’ itself has been recommended as an alternative to ‘war on terror’, partly because it suggested only a temporary suspension of legal norms in the pertinent theatre rather than a wholesale rewriting of legal norms through such devices as the US Patriot Act or European counter-terrorism legislation. The British army of that period gradually learned to refer to the Malayan Races Liberation Army as the ‘Communist Terrorist Organisation’. These semantic questions have become important in contemporary conflicts.1

After 9/11 the US proclaimed a ‘war on terror’, or ‘WOT’ or ‘GWOT’ if one adds the prefix global. Some deemed this to be as descriptively meaningless as a war on Blitzkrieg and as futile as a war on drugs, or felt that the word war unnecessarily elevated criminals. Most European allies of the US prefer to regard the struggle against terrorism as a law-enforcement issue, an approach which in some countries has duly led to lawyers and judges frustrating the impact of intelligence and police work. Among the alternatives to the WOT are the ‘long war’, a term used by the Provos to describe thirty years of violence in Northern Ireland; ‘the first global terrorist war’; or, more plausibly, Australian strategist David Kilcullen’s ‘war on the global jihadist insurgency’. None of these has the descriptive precision of, say, the Cold War, a concept that also recurs in discussions about winning Muslim hearts and minds and/or about how the West represents itself. What to call the enemy is also being revised in a fashion which some find Orwellian. An example of how the British government thinks was revealed when it enjoined the bureaucracy to talk of ‘anti-Islamic extremism’, not only eschewing the ‘T’ word altogether, but evading the source of the problem. Similar semantic recommendations, or ‘Words that Work and Words that Don’t’, were handed down in the US by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) in March 2008. ‘Extremism’ is favoured over an abruptly proscribed ‘jihadism’. Retired law-enforcement agents with long memories recall that in the 1970s the Carter administration similarly told Immigration and Nationalisation Service inspectors to refer to illegal aliens as ‘undocumented workers’ while avoiding announcing themselves as ‘criminal inspectors’.2

Although this conflict, which US officials think will be an inter-generational struggle, has scarcely begun, there is already debate about what will constitute victory. President George W. Bush’s premature declaration about the ending of major combat operations in Iraq from the flight deck of a warship did not anticipate the asymmetric war of attrition that was barely under way, an insurgency that partly reflected the wholesale dismissal of the Iraqi police and army, which have had to be painstakingly reconstructed from scratch. Since then over four thousand US troops have lost their lives, while many more have been blinded or left limbless, mainly because of sophisticated improvised roadside explosives. Expectations have been scaled down considerably, although advocates of the war in Iraq also periodically redefine the nature of victory.3 Inadvertently echoing Tory Northern Ireland secretary Reginald Maudling’s talk in the 1970s of ‘acceptable levels of violence’, in 2004 Kilcullen observed:

Different societies exhibit different normal, chronic levels of armed violence. Victory does not demand that we reduce violence to zero, or establish peace and prosperity in absolute terms. It only requires that we return the system to what is normal—for that society, in that region, in this period of history—so that society can re-establish normal pre-insurgency patterns of interaction.

Perhaps that realistic view is all we can hope for given that more ambitious strategies seem to have failed, and, in any case, go against powerful foundational traditions in US foreign-policy thinking which disdain seeking out monsters to slay.4

History is also pressed into service to