Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
Well it seems to imply soldiers and battlefields doesn't it? Regardless of it being used for drugs and whatnot, when you say war, people think armies.
Where in the phrase "war on terror" does the word soldier occur?
Well it seems to imply soldiers and battlefields doesn't it? Regardless of it being used for drugs and whatnot, when you say war, people think armies.
Besides, there ARE battlefields in Afghanistan, where there are pretty much conventional firefights. Theres also urban fighting, mines, and covert activities etc - as there was during WW2.
And there are places with similar mixes, including the conventional battlefields, in places where we dont have troops directly engaged, but we support allies in more or less overt ways - Somalia where we support the Ethiopians and the govt against the Islamic Courts, in North Africa where we support various North african and Sahel militaries against AQ in North Africa. Lebanon, where we supported the Leb Army against an AQ affilliate in one of the refugee camps. In Yemen, in the Phillipines, and more quietly, in Pakistan.
Now we can arbitrarily pretend theres no linkage between those struggles. We can call it a War on Al Qaeeda to avoid the overtones of civilizational war, though that doesnt change the use of the term "war" and it also tends to make people hung up on the actual affiliation of each group ("were those guys in Leb REALLY AQ affiliates, or were they Syrian backed?") We can do what the Pentagon has done, call it GSAVE, pretend its not a "war" despite some poor GI in Khost doing stuff at a firebase that seems very much like "war", or whatever. Pretending you can stop a group of Taliban consisting of 100 guys (who arent "soldiers" casuse they dont wear proper uniforms, and are irregularly organized) with automatic weapons, RPGs and mortars from taking over a village in Helmand by filing legal briefs in Glasqow, or that it matters whether that you call what you do to those 100 guys "an act against criminals" rather than a war, well, I suppose that matters to some people.
"So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called ....."
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