Woolwich, Boston, and the End of the War on Terror

Back in January, 2002, when George W. Bush’s war on terror was getting into full swing, Terry Jones, a British comedian who was part of the Monty Python troupe, asked an awkward question: “How do you wage war on an abstract noun? It’s rather like bombing murder.” Eleven years later, nobody has come up with a convincing answer, perhaps because there isn’t one. But in the past couple of days, we’ve seen some laudable efforts to reframe the question in a manner that’s more amenable to rational discourse.

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