We are no longer fighting the Global War on Terrorism. Before anyone gets too excited about such an announcement, they need to understand that it is purely a matter of semantics. Wouldn’t want anyone surrendering his or her position in Iraq based solely on verbiage. In an attempt to change people’s perception of the military’s ongoing foray into world policing, we have altered it’s title, softened the language, and proven once again that there is no problem or controversy too great that it cannot be solved with a thesaurus. According to our commander in chief, we should now refer to our “stuff” in Southwest Asia as Overseas Contingency Operations. Whatever. Does it mean I can come home yet? Turning a euphemism into another euphemism is one of those things that they should have a word for: euphomorphosis maybe. Either way, I think it’s pretty stupid.
My personal politics are not a well-kept secret, but the only thing I enjoy more than picking on conservatives is poking fun at anyone who’s in charge. Because people in charge are ALWAYS clueless (ask anyone that works for you). In this case, the Obama administration has failed to adhere to a fundamental tenet of leadership: coming up with new names for shit doesn’t change anything. When John Cougar Mellencamp became just John Mellencamp, it didn’t make “Hurt So Good” suck any less.
My problem is: I really liked The Global War on Terrorism (as a title, of course, not an endeavor). Being a soldier, I swim in a verbal cesspool of acronyms and I’ve learned that good ones are hard to come by. The abrupt, manly sound of GWOT (pronounced “gwaught”) made my life here in Iraq seem exciting and important. The military gave us a special GWOT medal for simply serving during this war and I was expecting another as soon as we had it won. Should I expect some sort of “Contingency” medal? It sounds like a parting gift.
There was a lot of stuff you could do with the term GWOT. Add a suffix and you get a career: GWOTer. Add a prefix and you can describe someone’s lack of dedication to the mission: “That was very unGWOT of you, Jim.” You could hyphenate it, thereby adding a second syllable and an all-around badass flavor: “G-WOT”. Drop the G and you have just a “War on Terror” and, ironically, the answer to all the world’s problem disguised as a question word: WOT? I don’t even know. It has been said (mostly by me) that Petraeus’s surge would have been even more successful had they stuck with the original name: “GWOT thrust”.
What am I supposed to do with OCO? Pronounced as its own word it sounds like some sort of healthy organic cereal. It’s probably one of those with all the bark and twigs in it that you’d find at Whole Foods next to the flax seed oil. My colon might be excited about it but the rest of me is just worried about explosive diarrhea.
The only legitimate problem that I had with the old title was the fact that it didn’t make any sense whatsoever. We’ve all heard the complaints: How can we possibly fight all terrorism everywhere all at once? Terrorism is a tactic not a country, etc… But at least it was a war. This new thing doesn’t sound like a war at all. And how are we supposed to get away with all the shooting and money-spending if we’re not in a war anymore?
Our battalion hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a quarter million dollar tree nursery in downtown Nasiriyah this week. This place was paid for by American tax dollars and all of the classy, gold-trimmed furniture in the main office was proof that it wasn’t wasted. It would have been nice for someone to maybe make a little speech and let everyone there understand what a bold step we just made in the WAR against terror. “See these trees, Osama? Yeah that’s right, suck it!” Instead, it’s like we just built a big tree nursery in the middle of the desert for no reason at all.
A humble message to those publicly elected officials back home: Nobody cares what you people call it! Just fix this crap, assholes!
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