"War Is Peace"

David Luban, writing at Balkinization,

...The real fallacy does not lie in labeling the struggle with Al Qaeda a "war," but in the false constitutional theory that gives the President a vast set of "war powers" to be used everywhere he discerns a "battlefield," which of course can be anywhere on Earth. Nothing in the Constitution suggests anything of the sort, and it is hard to see why a democratic constitution ought to do so. Perhaps, in a moment of supreme emergency, the President would be compelled to declare martial law. Bush’s constitutional theory turns a hypothetical "state of exception" into a long-term state of siege, the basic tactic of tyrants for the past two centuries, as Giorgio Agamben notes in his remarkable book State of Exception. Under the Bush theory, moreover, the President can have his martial law without ever declaring it publicly. That is the significance of the Administration’s secret illegal wiretapping. In their view, it was not illegal: it was part and parcel of the President’s war powers. But the public need not and should not know that the President was exercising those powers, because that might lead to political blowback that would interfere with his war plan. In other words, the fact that our phone conversations fall under a kind of martial law was a state secret...

In the end, what's wrong with calling the struggle against Al Qaeda a "war" is not that the war label is inaccurate. Rather, it's that the administration uses that label to justify an outrageous presidential power-grab, which apparently includes the power to conceal just how much power the President has grabbed. Oddly, it appears that not calling the Iraq debacle a "civil war" serves the same purpose: concealment for political reasons. Language becomes a tool to obfuscate, not to communicate. War is peace.