The Daily Background
| List: All the President’s Wars (Updated)
by Arlen Parsa
Here’s a list of all the names for President Bush’s wars. I originally wrote this post back in May, but since a new name has been coined, I have posted the following updated version. Talk about branding problems.
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1. First the President called it Crusade against Terrorism. This was quickly dropped for freaking obvious reasons.
2. Next there was Operation Infinite Justice (deemed too similar to the President’s original phrase).
3. So they changed it to Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF: Afghanistan).
4. Then Operation Iraqi Liberation (nixed because it spelled O.I.L. or “OIL”), so they made it Operation Iraqi Freedom (OiF).
5. Then there was the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT, sometimes truncated to just ‘The War on Terror’).
6. Then the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (GSAVE?!).
7. Then came Rumsfeld’s term ‘The Long War‘ (surely an encouraging name to a nation visibly sick of war at this point).
8. Now the President is basically just saying screw it all, let’s just go ahead and call it what we’ve wanted to call it all along: World War III.
9. Apparently even calling it World War III wasn’t scary enough, so it’s now been re-dubbed the
“war against Islamic fascism.”
In December 2006, Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview that he does not care for the name “war on terror” and wishes it would be called something else.
