Washington: The US is no longer engaged in a "war on terrorism"; neither is it fighting "jihadists" nor locked in a "global war" as the Obama administration's top homeland security and counterterrorism official has called the terms coined by the Bush administration as unacceptable.
It is now solely a "war with Al Qaeda" and its violent extremist allies, John Brennan, who heads the White House homeland security office, said during a speech on Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
The Washington Times reported on Friday that the "semantic shift" is intended to bring precision to the way the president and his aides talk about the nation's efforts to defeat Al Qaeda, though Bush administration officials point out that there is no dramatic change in the policies.
According to Brennan, to say the US is fighting "jihadists" is wrong because it is using "a legitimate term, 'jihad', meaning to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal", which "risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve."
"Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself," Brennan was quoted as saying.
He said the administration will not use the phrase 'war on terrorism' "because terrorism is but a tactic - a means to an end, which in Al Qaeda's case is global domination by an Islamic caliphate."
He also dismissed "global war" as a term that feeds the terror network's vision of itself as a "a highly organized, global entity capable of replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate."
In March, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the administration was not using the term "war on terror" but there was no specific directive on this from the White House. Barack Obama used the term "war on terror" Jan 23, his fourth day as president, but not after that.
Juan Zarate, a former deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism to George W. Bush, was in the audience and dismissed Brennan's speech as cosmetic.
"The question is: How do you deal with the policy?" said Zarate, who disagreed with Brennan's suggestion that the Obama administration is not continuing Bush-era policies.
Critics on either side of the political divide have pointed out that the Obama administration has continued policies such as drone attacks in Pakistan. A secret international and domestic surveillance programme remains on, and then there is the war in Afghanistan, where Obama has increased the number of US troops.
In addition, the White House is still considering the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects.
Brennan's speech was aimed at outlining ways in which the Obama administration wants to undermine the "upstream" factors that create an environment in which terrorists are created.
James K Glassman, who served as Bush's ambassador to the Muslim world as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, said the focus on "upstream" factors was "a good strategy because it's the same strategy that we had".
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