Continuity we can believe in

Soon after taking office, President Barack Obama made a commitment to abandon the phrase ‘War on Terror’, ¹ replacing it with the supposedly less emotive reference to ‘overseas contingency operations’. It was a move designed to publicly draw a line between the extreme rhetoric of the George W. Bush Administration and Obama’s promise of a more moderate presentation of policy. He was rejecting (what he saw as) the excessive language used by Bush and by which the previous administration had manipulated security discourse post-9/11. Specifically, Obama objected to the way in which the rhetoric of the ‘War on Terror’ had been used to create fear; fear that had been central to realising political strategies that may otherwise have proved prohibitively contentious, most notably military action in Iraq. It was also a language that had undermined Muslim relations and created hierarchies of good and evil that exacerbated existing tensions instead of marginalising extremist elements. Discarding the ‘War on Terror’ reference, therefore, was about breaking down these linguistic constructions and replacing the words political actors used with a more pragmatic and considered rhetorical approach. As Obama (cited in ‘Obama Tells Al Arabiya Peace Talks Should Resume’, 2009) said: ‘… the language we use matters’. The way we talk about the world has real implications for our actions within it. If we rely on disproportionate and exaggerated language to express ourselves, so then our response risks becoming disproportionate and exaggerated. This was the incentive to escape the rhetorical confines of the ‘War on Terror.’