In Patrick Poage’s response to Tuesday’s guest column, he took offense to the characterization of the United States’ actions against al-Qaida and other terror organizations as a “war on terror.”
Poage correctly points out that the Obama administration has dropped use of that phrase. Regardless, if it is not a war that we are engaged in, then what exactly is the U.S. military doing in Afghanistan and Iraq? If the United States is not at war, then why is the U.S. military, as opposed to law enforcement agencies, being sent into those countries?
Indeed, President Barack Obama may add or drop the use of any such phrase to garner support among his party’s base; however, such a change in wording amounts to semantics at best. If Poage thinks that by simply refusing to call our actions abroad a “war on terror,” terrorists will somehow magically gain sympathy for people they are otherwise religiously sworn to kill (“infidels”), then I am afraid Poage is holding terrorists to a standard well above what they deserve. Let us remember that long before President George W. Bush, or anyone else, used the phrase “war on terror”, al-Qaida attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and bombed the U.S.S. Cole, and these events occurred prior to al-Qaida’s hijacking air planes and flying them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in 2001.
