Early in the administration, we decided to move away from the phrase “Global War on Terror,” believing that you can’t wage war against a tactic, nor could you ever defeat it. We also generally avoided using the word “Islam” in describing the enemy because terrorist groups like al Qaeda wanted to cast themselves as a religious movement. After bin Laden was killed, communications were found in his compound in which he lamented that the absence of a religious name for al Qaeda allowed the West to “claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam.”
