Recently, I was reading something on the web that mocked the marketing of policies with the statement, “we are engaged in a ‘war on (insert threatening noun here)’”. The target of the mocking was the utterly misnamed “war on terror”, the naming of which follows a dubious legacy left by the “war on drugs” and the “war on poverty”, neither of which has been very successful by any meaningful, objective measure. Given how I have to be precise in my use of language in my job (mis-description can cost us a lot of money), I become particularly irritated by the continual use of the phrase “war on terror” to describe what to most people started on September 11, 2001. That was not the first day of conflict (it was indeed the second time the New York World Trade Center towers had been subject to a terrorist attack), and our collective ignorance of the world played no small role in the ultimate origins of the attacks.

Calling our efforts to counter terrorists attacks a “war” is elevating criminal acts above their true station, but if we insist upon using the term “war” then a more proper name is the blowback war.

“Blowback” refers to how the actions of the United States in Afghanistan and other regions in efforts to stymie the Soviet Union ended up creating more enemies of the United States than friends.

Using the correct terms may be the only way we can gain in this conflict, but unfortunately we are only capable of focusing on the here and now, not the too recent past.