Philosoraptor on FDR’s ‘War on Sneakiness’
Here’s a short item that I liked from Philosoraptor: GWOT: WTF?
People have complained about the confusions–semantic and otherwise–surrounding this issue many times, and perhaps more griping isn’t in order. It’s been said that declaring a war on terrorism after 9/11 was like declaring war on Mexico after Pearl Harbor…but that’s not right.
Rather, it’s as if after Pearl Harbor we had, instead of declaring war on Japan, declared war on sneak attacks–that is, on the tactic rather than the institution that employed the tactic.
But linguistic sloppiness and the pressures of political rhetoric have confused things even more, making the war on terrorism into the war on “terror.” So, to stick with our WWII analogy, it’s as if we’d responded to Pearl Harbor with a “War on Sneakiness.”
As I mentioned in the comments to that item, it was Richard Clarke who first made the “like bombing Mexico in response to Pearl Harbor” observation, and he was talking about bombing Iraq after 9/11, not about waging war on “terrorism,” which Clarke would probably support, albeit (obviously) not in the form that the Bush administration has actually conducted it.
