In April, a new American president—the son of a black Muslim father from Kenya and a white Christian mother from Kansas—stood on the floor of the Turkish parliament and, in a historic address, declared that the United States “is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.” The fact that President Barack Hussein Obama felt it necessary to make such a statement is evidence of how thoroughly the “war on terror” has become synonymous with a crusade against Islam. So much so, in fact, that the current administration has decided to jettison the term completely and replace it with the more innocuous, if a bit silly, “overseas contingency operations.”
Not surprising, the new phrase, which sounds more like a backpacking trip through Europe than a multipronged military conflict, received a healthy dose of ridicule in the American press. But the change in terminology is not an insignificant move. Indeed, it may be the first step toward fashioning a far more effective response to the challenge posed by radical and extremist forces in the Muslim world than we saw from the previous administration.
On Sept. 16, 2001, President Bush launched the so-called war on terror with a sentence that reverberated across the globe: “This crusade,” Bush said, pausing for what seemed like an eternity, “this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”
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