it's time to change the slogan
Bush administration has decided to change the name of its counterterrorist campaign from "the global war on terrorism" to "the global struggle against violent extremism"
В принципе, в старом термине "War against Terrorism" смысла было так же мало, как и в "War against Knife-Stabbing". Врага надо формулировать более конкретно.
Look at the first letters of Global War on Terrorism. GWOT. What does that mean; how is it pronounced? Gwot? Too frivolously rowdy, like a fight scene in a Marvel comic book (Bam! Pfooff! Gwot!). Gee-wot? Sounds like a garbled question (Gee what?).
Then look at Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. Its acronym is GSAVE i.e., gee-save. We're out to save the world, see, not wage war on it. Or, as national security adviser Stephen Hadley puts it in the Times piece, "We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative."
Новый термин получше, но если они рассчитывают на магию слова - что от переименования лодки она лучше поплывет...
Second, the White House and the Pentagon are just now coming around to the idea that the struggle is as much ideological as military? This wasn't obvious, say, three or four years ago?
Apparently not. Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, the Times reporters who co-authored the article, note:
Administration and Pentagon officials say the revamped campaign has grown out of meetings of President Bush's senior national security advisers that began in January, and it reflects the evolution in Mr. Bush's own thinking nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
It took four years for the president of the United States to realize that fighting terrorism has a political component? It took six months for his senior advisers to retool a slogan?
Тяжелый случай...
MaxSt.