Paul Koring
The Globe and Mail
August 7, 2009

The “global war on terrorism” is over and calling it that was a bad idea, President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism adviser said Thursday.

The phrase, coined by former president George W. Bush and often rendered in Washington speak as GWOT (pronounced “gee whot”) enraged many of his critics who argued that it was impossible to wage war on a tactic (or a noun). Mr. Obama has studiously avoided the phase and Thursday, John Brennan, the top White House adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism, explained why.

In his first public speech, the veteran CIA agent said that the shift is more sweeping than a change in vocabulary and that it reflects the President’s broad philosophical approach.

“The President does not describe this as a ‘war on terrorism,’ ” Mr. Brennan said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That is because terrorism is but a tactic, a means to an end, which in al-Qaeda’s case is global domination by an Islamic caliphate. Confusing ends and means is dangerous, because by focusing on the tactic, we risk floundering among the terrorist trees while missing the growth of the extremist forest.”

Similarly, Mr. Brennan said, Mr. Obama “does not describe this as a global war, believing it makes al-Qaeda too big and important.

“Describing our efforts as a global war only plays into the warped narrative that al-Qaeda propagates. It plays into the misleading and dangerous notion” that the United States is fighting “the very image that al-Qaeda seeks to project of itself – that it is a highly organized, global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate.”

“Nothing,” Mr. Brennan said, “could be further from the truth.”

Instead, he tried to portray al-Qaeda as “seriously damaged,” nearly eight years after the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings destroyed New York’s twin towers and damaged the Pentagon. However, Osama bin Laden remains at large and “al-Qaeda has proven to be adaptive and highly resilient and remains the most serious terrorist threat we face,” Mr. Brennan said, adding that another major attack with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons targeting an American city “remains the top priority for the al-Qaeda senior leadership.”

Mr. Brennan insisted that the change in thinking is far more sweeping than just a rhetorical rollback of some of the Bush administration’s lexicological overreach.

“As the President has made clear, we are at war with al-Qaeda, which attacked us on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people. We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al-Qaeda’s murderous agenda. These are the terrorists we will destroy. These are the extremists we will defeat,” Mr. Brennan said.

While the gravity of the conflict hasn’t changed, the scope of the war and what will be needed for victory is seen quite differently by Mr. Obama.

He sees the struggle as a wider conflict, requiring the West to address poverty, ignorance, repression. “Poverty does not cause violence and terrorism,” Mr. Brennan said. “Lack of education does not cause terrorism. But just as there is no excuse for the wanton slaughter of innocents, there is no denying that when children have no hope for an education, when young people have no hope for a job and feel disconnected from the modern world, when governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, then people become more susceptible to ideologies of violence and death. Extremist violence and terrorist attacks are therefore often the final murderous manifestation of a long process rooted in hopelessness, humiliation, and hatred.”

In a subsequent question-and-answer session, Mr. Brennan hedged when asked whether Mr. Obama would make good on his promise to close Guantanamo Bay – the notorious prison for terrorism suspects where hundreds have been held for as long as several years without charge – within a year of taking office.

“It is our full intention to close down Guantanamo Bay per the President’s direction, and we are doing everything possible to meet that direction, and meet that deadline,” he said.