Who won the GWOT?

Apparently, the Global War On Terror (GWOT) is over. It seems we're now engaged in the "global struggle against violent extremism", which has the virtues of encompassing all aspects of life the government would like to monitor and control — for instance, checking a book out of the library — and having a much better acronym (GSAVE). I gotta wonder, though — isn't "struggle" a commie word?

And if the "private/personal accounts" example applies here, we should expect the administration and its propaganda arms to immediately start using GSAVE rather than GWOT, to deny that they had ever used the term GWOT, and to claim that GWOT was an invention of their opponents.

The irony is, those opponents have insisted from the beginning that military action was no way to combat a tactic, a mindset, or non-state actors, and that a broader approach was needed. Such an approach would include trying to understand terrorism so that future attacks could be prevented, something recently derided by Karl Rove as "therapy" for terrorists.

If this represents a genuine change of heart, I welcome them to the reality-based community, and wish they'd done so before tens of thousands had died for their fantasies.

Technorati Tags: GWOT, GSAVE, Terrorism