It appears the Global War on Terror is coming to an end. It may even be over. No armistice, no surrender ceremony, just a rhetorical adjustment, and the clash of civilizations shrinks and shifts and morphs, and emerges as … a struggle.

Members of Congress noticed it on Monday as Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq, trod Capitol Hill on President George W. Bush's behalf. He was trying to assure the legislators who control the public's money that all the slaughter notwithstanding, things are looking cheerier in Iraq.

Petraeus, an immensely self-possessed man so decorated with brass and medals that he seems to sit with a stoop, used crisp, unemotional language to describe the vicious civil conflict in Iraq that he's trying to dampen. There was no florid talk about meeting and defeating the forces of evil and terror on the battlefield of history.

Ethnic and sectarian violence will continue, he said. Shia death squads are still active. And, as he put it, elements of "the global Islamic extremist movement" are there in force.

Global Islamic extremist movement?

The phrasing was not overlooked. "I find it absolutely astonishing that after three and a half hours of testimony that I can't recall anyone saying 'International War on Terrorism,'" observed Congressman Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat who heads the House subcommittee on the Middle East. "Because that is why we were supposed to be fighting there. So they're not fighting here."

The big buildup

Ackerman's confusion is understandable. Like other Americans, he has been listening to his president and his president's officials say for years that this nation is at war — a Global War on Terror — in which Iraq is the "central front."

As Ackerman noted, Americans were told repeatedly that they had to take the War on Terror to the terrorists, to keep the terrorists from bringing the War on Terror here. "Make no mistake about it," said President Bush in Texas on August 4, 2005. "We are at war. We're at war with an enemy that attacked us on September 11, 2001."

He used the phrase "War on Terror" five times during that address, and hundreds, if not thousands of times since the attacks of 9/11.

It worked pretty well, too. The whole country internalized it. Everybody started using it, even the Democrats.

Fox News and, to a lesser extent, CNN seemed to have "WAR ON TERROR" permanently plastered across the bottom of their TV broadcasts. Bumper stickers blared it. Anyone who questioned it was regarded as subversive.

Bush referred to himself as a "war president" and insisted, successfully, on special wartime powers. These included: warrantless wiretapping of American citizens; "extraordinary renditions;" and powers of arbitrary detention that flouted the U.S. Constitution.

Who exactly is the enemy?

Of course, the brilliance of the War on Terror, as a political device at least, was its imprecision. Who was the enemy?

In the end, the enemy was anyone the administration said was the enemy, and often that information was classified. Soldiers went off to fight in Iraq, Afghanistan as well as uncounted secret battles worldwide as special forces descended on places like Somalia.

Secret prisons were set up as well. And Congress paid up, making hundreds of billions of dollars available to the president.

"Terrorists" were everywhere in those first few years after 9/11. Nests of them were uncovered and arrested in the U.S. and in Canada, too.

Some of them seemed dangerous. Others seemed clownish, people clearly incapable of actually carrying out any attacks — some were even homeless.

But no matter. Terrorism in the American discourse had become a state of mind, an intent and an attitude as much as an action.

The already murky definition of terrorist expanded far beyond those who slaughter innocents to advance an agenda. Government officials began describing those who attacked American troops in their own countries as terrorists. Entire towns and cities in Iraq were deemed to be teeming with terrorists. Battles against terrorists lasted days and convulsed cities.

Other national leaders picked up on it, too, and who could blame them? Governments from the Mideast to Eastern Europe and Asia found new legitimacy in often brutal efforts to crush opponents. The War on Terror conferred a licence that could not be argued with.

Even Stephen Harper, in Canada saw the power in the phrase. "Canada," Harper declared in January 2006, "has made an important contribution to the war on terror in Afghanistan."

Re-branding a war

But six 9/11s have now passed since the original. And, as Congressman Ackerman noted, the phrase War on Terror is out of vogue. British leaders stopped using it a while ago. And even here in the U.S., as a political tool, it's clearly exhausted.

Because, as the people who run focus groups here are no doubt telling their masters, the average citizen expects some sort of resolution to a war. You win a war, or you lose a war. At some point, though, and that point has clearly come in the U.S., people start asking when they can reasonably expect a VE Day. Or in this case, VT Day.

The answer to that, of course, is maybe never. Certainly not in this lifetime. Because the phenomenon the West commonly calls terrorism is not militarily defeatable. It stems from ethnic nationalism, tribalism and religion, forces as powerful and primordial as sex.

And when governments all over the world are calling their political opponents terrorists, the word loses its impact and, eventually, even its meaning.

The Pentagon knows that very well and has been trying to modify its message for some time.

The U.S. military dropped the phrase "the long war" last spring, and, as Ackerman noted this week, it generally avoids "War on Terror," too.

In 2005, at the behest of the military, then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to phase out War on Terror and test drove the phrase "global struggle against extremism" instead. It didn't take. His boss smacked it down in that Texas speech a few days later.

Now, though, even President Bush has come around. He's still clearly fond of Global War on Terror, and uses it from time to time, but "global struggle against extremists," or a variation on that theme, is now making it into his speeches, too.

It popped up in a speech in Washington in June, then in his remarks at Montebello, Que., in August and in Sydney, Australia, last week, at the Asia-Pacific meeting.

Perhaps it's seen as a less alarming term. It invokes something less apocalyptic and, importantly, more long-term. You can, after all, struggle forever, and the struggle itself remains a noble endeavour.

This rhetorical shift at the top can seem a bit rich to journalists, many of whom had reservations about using the term War on Terror, or even the word terrorist, in the first place.

Many reporters preferred to use words like, yes, "extremists," and took tremendous blasts of heat from conservative and special interest groups for doing so in the early years following 9/11.

Some of those groups fight on. A group called Freedom's Watch, for example, placed a full-page ad in the New York Times today, throwing President Bush's old rhetoric back at him and at Gen. Petreaus: "WE ARE FIGHTING A GLOBAL WAR AGAINST TERRORISM. SURRENDER TO TERRORISTS IS NOT AN OPTION. VICTORY IS AMERICA'S ONLY CHOICE."

It had an almost nostalgic ring to it.

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LETTERS:

Neil Macdonald is exactly the sort of journalist which journalism needs most. Such incisive, penetrating commentary -- all without sacrificing journalistic integrity -- should be admired.

The impartial criticism of domestic and foreign policies, as in this article, are critical to the very character of our democracy. It is reassuring in these dark times to see that Canada's (and indeed the CBC's) reputation for excellent journalists is not unfounded.

Keep up the great work.

—P. Knight | Ottawa

One of the best pieces on the phenomenon of the "war on terror" I've seen in a long time. I'm glad someone has said it, and in a manner that is courageous, insightful, thought-inspiring--and a beautiful read. Thanks.

—Jessica McDiarmid | Hamilton, Ont.

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