NAME CALLING.(The Talk of the Town)("global struggle against violent extremism" replaces "global war on terrorism" in U.S. government jargon)

You had to be a careful reader of the inside pages of the Times last week to notice that America is no longer fighting the global war on terrorism. The Administration has replaced, or revised, or expanded the G.W.O.T. with a new phrase: "a global struggle against violent extremism." The war is now a struggle. The terrorist enemy is now the violent extremist enemy. The focus has shifted from a tactic to an ideology. In a major new strategy document quoted in U.S. News & World Report, the Pentagon is even more specific (and more accurate), venturing onto delicate ground by calling the threat "Islamist extremism" and "extremist Sunni and Shia movements that exploit Islam for political ends." In June, a Marine lieutenant general, Wallace Gregson, floated the new thinking in a speech: "This is no more a war on terrorism than the Second World War was a war on submarines," he said. "The decisive terrain in this war is the vast majority of people who are not directly involved but whose support, willing or coerced, is necessary to insurgent operations around the world." On July 12th, Donald Rumsfeld used the new language in a press conference, repeating the word "extremist" or variations of it eleven times. On July 23rd, two top White House officials followed up with an Op-Ed in the Times: "At its root, the struggle is an ideological contest, a war of ideas that engages all of us, public servant and private citizen, regardless of nationality." The President's chief of staff, Andrew Card, once said of war planning for Iraq, "You don't introduce new products in August," but the rebranding of the war formerly known as G.W.O.T. has all the earmarks of a full-blown summer marketing campaign. What's going on here?

Something serious, in fact--almost unprecedented. The Administration is admitting that its strategy since September 11th has failed, without really admitting it. The single-minded emphasis on hunting down terrorists has failed ("Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people," Gregson said). The use of military force as the country's primary and, at times, only response has failed, and has stretched the Army and the Marines to the breaking point. Unilateralism has failed. "It's not a military project alone, and the United States cannot do it by itself alone," Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy and a leading advocate of going it alone with military force, said on his way out the Pentagon door and into private life (good luck, fellas!). The overwhelmingly American character of the war has failed, isolating moderate Muslims--who, in the end, are the only hope for political change--or driving them closer to the radicals. Loading the entire burden of the war onto the backs of American soldiers, while telling the rest of the citizenry to go about its business, has failed, even as public relations: in a recent Gallup poll, only thirty-four per cent of Americans said that we are winning the war on terrorism. The phrase has outlived its enormous political usefulness.

These recognitions are late in coming. Arguments for a broader, deeper, more nuanced strategy appeared in the report of the 9/11 Commission, a year ago. They were the basis for a sixteen-billion-dollar national-security bill that was introduced by Senate Democrats in January, and is currently going nowhere. At the Pentagon, they date back to October of 2003, to a memorandum in which Rumsfeld candidly asked, "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying ...