New Propaganda Catchphrase: "The Long War"

The masters of war are premiering a catchy new propaganda slogan: "The Long War." This is an attempt to inure Americans into seeing nothing abnormal about a state of permanent war.

The campaign, which has been awhile in the making, is officially on now with a major speech yesterday by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The United States is engaged in what could be a generational conflict akin to the Cold War, the kind of struggle that might last decades as allies work to root out terrorists across the globe and battle extremists who want to rule the world, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday.

Rumsfeld, who laid out broad strategies for what the military and the Bush administration are now calling the "long war," likened al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin while urging Americans not to give in on the battle of wills that could stretch for years. He said there is a tendency to underestimate the threats that terrorists pose to global security, and said liberty is at stake.

Under the OPLAN, years are supposed to stretch into forever.

The speech, which aides said was titled "The Long War," came on the eve of the Pentagon's release of its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), which sets out plans for how the U.S. military will address major security challenges 20 years into the future. The plans to be released today include shifts to make the military more agile and capable of dealing with unconventional threats, something Rumsfeld has said is necessary to move from a military designed for the Cold War into one that is more flexible...

Indeed, the QDR, mandated every four years by Congress, opens with the declaration: "The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war."

Here's a little background on the origins of the nebulous new slogan for our info-op.

With its formal embrace this week of the term "long war," the Bush administration has turned a simple descriptive phrase into an official name for the war on terrorism, and possibly catapulted it into the ranks of such other era names as "Cold War" and "World War."

The phrase has a long history. It has been applied to the 15-year war between the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire that started in the 1590s. It also was a name proposed by University of Texas law professor Philip Bobbitt to cover a collection of 20th-century conflicts, from World War I to the Cold War, which resulted in democracy triumphing over communism and fascism.

Its recent rise to rhetorical prominence in the U.S. military, according to several military officers, began in 2004 with Gen. John P. Abizaid, the Central Command chief who oversees military operations in the Middle East. Abizaid invoked the phrase to underscore the long-term challenge posed by al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups.

This "challenge" will be quite profitable for certain defense-related elements in the United States. Taxpayers, though may not end up seeing it that way.

James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, co-wrote a book last year titled "Winning the Long War: Lessons from the Cold War for Defeating Terrorism and Preserving Freedom." Carafano said the name captures the only major element of the war about which everyone agrees.

"We can't agree it's global, we can't agree it's terrorism, but we all generally agree it's a war . . . [and] it's going to be long," Carafano said. "Transnational terrorism is the problem of the 21st century."

Everyone agrees? Who is this we? You and all the other defense industry jerkoffs, that's about it. And the cowardly sheeple who are your natural constituents.

Not everyone has favored adopting "long war" as the official label of this struggle.

"The term certainly has some negative baggage that goes along with it," said one senior officer, who said concerns were raised by some at Central Command and at the Pentagon as well as by some allied governments. "No one wants to be involved in a long war."

But President Bush bought into its use this week. In his State of the Union message, he declared, "Our own generation is in a long war against a determined enemy."

If these dipshits have so much excess energy to come up with something like this, why don't they do something productive.

Like starting to work on their taxes.