A good friend of mine has an idea about how to deal with the word games being played over what we call the current war we’re waging with international terrorists.
My pal Jim, who lives in Arizona, writes: “Let‘s call it a conflict. Didn’t we use that term before to soften the impact?”
Boy, howdy! We sure did.
Remember the Korean conflict? Or the Vietnam conflict? The “conflicts” in Korea and Vietnam turned into “wars” eventually, but many headline writers and journalists writing about Vietnam often didn’t capitalize the “w” in “war,” as if to suggest that it wasn’t really a war.
Perhaps this sidesteps the issue. My earlier blog post noted the discussion about whether the Obama administration is right to avoid using the term “Islamic terrorists” to describe the enemy with whom we are at, um, war. My point is that we need not quibble over what to call the enemy, but we should instead concentrate our efforts solely on actually fighting these monsters.
Whatever we call the enemy, or the fight in which we are engaged, it’s a war by any known definition of the word.
I’ve noted before that we’re in a form of a world war, although it doesn’t resemble the two previous world wars in which we fought — Nos. I and II. Those wars involved nations declaring war on other nations. It involved mass mobilizations of men, who then were sent to battlefields to fight men from other nations that had done the very same thing.
Our wars since WWII, though, have materialized differently. We’ve had no formal declaration since President Roosevelt asked Congress on Dec. 8, 1941 to declare that “a state of war has existed” between the United States and Japan.
But we’ve fought actual wars. The men and women who’ve died in battle have been killed just as dead as they were in World Wars I and II.
I told my friend Jim that I’ve always hated the term “conflict” to describe war.
Instead, I prefer to call these fights what they are. And what we’re fighting today is no less gruesome and deadly than any war we’ve ever fought.