Don’t lie to us

Two weeks ago this magazine called for an end to the use of the phrase ‘War on Terror’, an appeal for which we were denounced by the neocon tendency in this country and in America. It is all the more gratifying, therefore, that the Bush administration has responded speedily, and announced that the slogan is to be quietly shelved in favour of the ‘struggle against violent extremism’, a formulation that is admittedly duller, but has the virtue of being less moronic. As we have argued, to call this a war is to dignify terrorists and criminals with the status of warriors, and was a mistake this country never made throughout the period of IRA bombings.

To call this war may send a surge of adrenalin through the neocon bloodstream, since it seems to offer a military solution to the clash of civilisations in which they so fervently believe; it may provoke a cocaine rush of excitement in the systems of bored evangelical Christians, for whom the notion of a war of faiths is less unappealing than it ought to be; but the worst single consequence of allowing governments to prosecute a great nebulous ‘war on terror’, at home and abroad, is that it encourages them to think that they may behave like all governments in time of war, not just by eroding the liberty of the citizenry, but also by lying to them.