President Obama went on offense today in declaring that the enemy in our current war against terror doesn’t comprise “religious leaders.”
We are fighting terrorists, pure and simple, he said.
So, the president will continue to resist referring to the enemy as “Islamic terrorists,” or “Islamist terrorists,” or some such derivation of the use of a word describing a great religion.
While some of us — including yours truly — disagree with the president’s decision to avoid using the term “Islamic terrorist” in describing our enemy, I am willing to drop the argument.
We’re now quibbling over semantics.
“We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam,” he said. “No religion is responsible for terrorism. People are responsible for violence and terrorism.”
Obama sounds just like his immediate predecessor, former President George W. Bush, on this matter. President Bush made precisely the same point when we went to war in Afghanistan immediately after the 9/11 attacks. Was there an outcry then about how we defined the enemy? If there was, well, it’s gotten lost on me.
Yet the outcry continues to this day about the current president’s use of language to describe the war that is on-going.
What difference does any of this make? What ought to matter is what we’re doing on the field of battle. We’re bombing Islamic State targets, along with aircraft being flown by our allies. I’m certain we’re killing terrorists; we’re even killing some of their leaders. We’re seeking to disrupt the terrorists’ command and control operations. We’re attempting to blast them into oblivion. We are deploying special operations units to hunt them down on the ground. We’re putting men and women at supreme risk of being captured.
OK, so we’re not calling them Islamic terrorists. The bad guys know who they are and what they represent. So do the good guys — and we’re acting accordingly.
Let’s stick to the mission in the field and quit arguing over what to call it.