But the war on terror wasn’t ultimately a fight between countries, as the Gulf War had been. It was a “very new type of conflict,” Rumsfeld told the press a week after 9/11. “We’ll have to deal with the networks.” This metaphor of the network—a set of connected points—became ubiquitous, acquiring the same sort of buzzword cachet that quagmire had possessed in the Vietnam War. The connotation pointed in another direction, though. If quagmire described a fight on the ground, network suggested that the space of the battlefield would be different, or that it might not even make sense to speak of
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