THE WAR ON WHAT?(War on Terrorism)

Just a few hours after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, President Bush made a brief appearance at Barksdale Air Force Base, in Louisiana. "Make no mistake," he said, "the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts." It was a clear, specific reaction to the attacks. Nine days later, when Bush came to the Capitol to give his first full speech about the attacks, before a joint session of Congress, he identified Al Qaeda as their perpetrator and laid out a detailed course of action: the United States would go after Al Qaeda all over the world; Al Qaeda's chief governmental protector, the Taliban, would have to cooperate fully, or it would be removed from power in Afghanistan. Then he added two memorable, but less specific, sentences: "Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated."

The difference between retaliating against Al Qaeda and declaring war on terror is the difference between a response and a doctrine. Beginning with that first speech, Bush has steadily upped the doctrinal ante. The next time Bush addressed a joint session of Congress--when he delivered his State of the Union Message, in January--he said, "Our nation will continue to be steadfast and patient and persistent in the pursuit of two great objectives. First, we will shut down terrorist camps, disrupt terrorist plans, and bring terrorists to justice. And, second, we must prevent the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world." So now there was a second doctrine: Bush was broadening the United States' understanding of being at war, extending it from international terrorist organizations to governments that were not necessarily connected to Al Qaeda or involved in the September 11th attacks. In three less noticed speeches, at military universities--The Citadel, last December; Virginia Military Institute, in April; and West Point, in June--Bush has made it clear that the United States intends to remove from power more governments than just Afghanistan's. In the West Point speech, the most significant of the three, he said that the "Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment" are no longer sufficient for the United States, and that from now on "we must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge"--in other words, wage war on other states preventively.

All these formulations are important, but "war on terror" is the one that has caught on. It isn't just Bush who uses it constantly; the press and his Democratic opposition do, too. The phrase meets the basic test of Presidential rhetoric: it has entered the language so fully, and framed the way people think about how the United States is reacting to the September 11th attacks so completely, that the idea that declaring and waging war on terror was not the sole, inevitable, logical consequence of the attacks just isn't in circulation.

During the drafting of Bush's first speech, there was debate even within the Administration about the use of the word "war" (although since practically the first thing Bush said on hearing that a second plane had flown into the World Trade Center was "We're at war," it was probably beside the point). Presidents have been declaring metaphoric war on non-traditional enemies--that is, not sovereign states or alliances--at least since Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, in 1964. Doing so has clear advantages. It promises the public a dramatic effort to solve a terrible problem, while implicitly asking in return for the kind of support that politicians get only in extraordinary circumstances. But there are disadvantages, too. Traditional wars are fought by military means and have definite endings. Metaphoric wars don't. Terror, like poverty and inflation and drugs, will never sit at a desk and sign an unconditional surrender in front of television cameras. The public can tire of a war that lasts for years. The war metaphor can become a trap: a single successful terrorist attack on the United States, even a relatively minor one, would surely open up a discourse about having "lost" the war on terror. The Administration is aware of these difficulties--that's why Bush declared war on terror with caveats about the war's not being likely to have a neat conclusion and requiring great patience on the public's part, and why other officials, especially Attorney General John Ashcroft, have talked about future attacks as a virtual certainty. Still, over the past year the Administration has succeeded in convincing the country that it is notionally at war.

Although Bush qualified his initial declaration of war on terrorists with the phrase "of global reach," he was still, in effect, promising to wipe out not just Al Qaeda but every other jihad organization that operates across national borders. He was also inviting countries to ask--as Israel, Russia, India, and others have done--for more American help in their own ...