Obama Administration Says Goodbye to 'war on Terror'

The war on terror, George Bush once declared, "will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated". But Barack Obama's administration, it appears, has ended it rather more discreetly - via email.

A message sent recently to senior Pentagon staff explains that "this administration prefers to avoid using the term Long War or Global War On Terror (Gwot) ... please pass this on to your speechwriters". Instead, they have been asked to use a bureaucratic phrase that could hardly be further from the fiery rhetoric of the months immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The global war on terror is dead; long live "overseas contingency operations".

Rumours of the imminent demise of the war on terror had been circulating for some time, and some key officials have been mentioning "overseas contingency operations" for weeks. The US defence department email, obtained by the Washington Post, seems to confirm the shift, although the Office of Management and Budget, which reviews the public testimony of administration personnel in advance, denied reports that it had ordered an across-the-board change in language.

Tony Blair was an avid supporter of Bush's terminology - "whatever the technical or legal issues about a declaration of war, the fact is we are at war with terrorism", he once said - but experts came to agree that the phrase was unhelpful.

A war on terror was too broad ever to be won, they argued, while defining not a group or ideology but a type of violence as the enemy was incoherent.

Even Donald Rumsfeld, one of the war's architects, tried in vain to persuade Bush to rebrand it the "global struggle against violent extremism", or GSave. Writing in the Guardian in January, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, said it had been a mistake that may have caused "more harm than good".

Since taking office, Obama has taken several concrete steps to shift direction, ordering the closure of Guantanamo Bay and the CIA's secret prisons, and moving to end harsh interrogation practices.

"Declaring war on a method of violence was like declaring war on amphibious warfare," said Jeffrey Record, a strategy expert at the US military's Air War College in Alabama.

"Also, it suggested that there was a military solution, and that we were at war with all practitioners of terrorism, whether they threatened American interests or not. 'War' is very much overused here in the United States - on crime, drugs, poverty. Everything has to be a war. We would have been much smarter to approach terrorism as the Europeans do, as a criminal activity."

But he was not enthusiastic about the replacement term. "I'm not sure it means much of anything," he said. "And I'm not sure we're going to make any great progress by replacing one unfortunate term with another."