On December 28th, I began the first draft of a blog piece thus:

We need to stop thinking of terrorism as the disease and look at it instead as a symptom. In illnesses we have to treat unacceptably dangerous symptoms too, such as a high fever, but in the end we have to go to the root causes of the disease.

I never got any further with these ideas, and now, with President Obama, perhaps I don’t need to. What a difference the past few months have made!

Unlike the Bush administration, the Obama administration does not use the term “Global War on Terror.” I believe that this is not only a cosmetic change to differentiate the current administration from the previous one. Instead it constitutes recognition of the fact that terror is one part of a host of other problems, which differ according to region. The matrix of the Taliban, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, for instance, raises a rather different set of challenges than does Iraq or Iran or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even if they overlap in significant ways. Of course, the fight against terrorists will continue, but the new administration is no longer attempting to squeeze the broad set of foreign policy and security challenges it faces into the “Global War on Terror” rubric, which seemed to give the previous administration a bad case of tunnel vision.