Ending the War on Terror

Isn't it time to put this tired metaphor to rest? The new British prime minister certainly thinks so:

When terrorists tried to blow up civilians in London and Glasgow, Gordon Brown, the new British prime minister, responded in his own distinctive way.

What had just been narrowly averted, he said, was not a new jihadist act of war but instead a criminal act. As if to underscore the point, Brown instructed his ministers that the phrase "war on terror" was no longer to be used and, indeed, that officials were no longer even to employ the word "Muslim" in connection with the terrorism crisis.

I can hear the nuts on the Right shrieking in horror now: He's naive. He's let the anti-war Left push him into a politically correct stance that will only mean the end of Western Civilization as we know it.

But Brown and other advocates of the terror-as-crime view are not necessarily under any delusions about jihadist thinking. Rather, they maintain that preventing terrorism requires winning the hearts and minds of actual human beings - and that declarations of war, including declarations of wars of ideas, are unlikely to be helpful in this regard.

It's about time we stepped away from the mindless slogans and bumper sticker mentality that maintains war is the only way to deal with things. If you want to alienate and enrage a billion people, keep waging a war against Muslims, keep denigrating their history, their culture, and their religion. If you want to minimize the possibility of future attacks we might kick back on the hateful rhetoric, throw our resources behind police work--not the military--and end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

war on terror

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