RealClearPolitics - Articles - Is the War on Terror Over? Do we still need to fight a war on terror?

The answer seems to be no for an increasing number in the West who are weary over Afghanistan and Iraq or complacent from the absence of a major attack on the scale of 9/11.

The British Foreign Office has scrapped the phrase “war on terror” as inexact, inflammatory and counterproductive. U.S. Central Command has just dropped the term “long war” to describe the fight against radical Islam.

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This thinking may seem understandable given the ineffectiveness of al-Qaida to kill many Americans after 9/11. Or it may also reflect hopes that if we only leave Iraq, radical Islam will wither away. But it is dead wrong for a number of reasons.

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Third, in some ways stateless terrorists can be more dangerous than past conventional threats. Autocrats in some Middle East countries allow indirect financial and psychological support for al-Qaida terrorists without leaving footprints of their intent. They must assume that a single terrorist strike could kill thousands of Americans without our ability to strike back at their capitals. This inability to tie a state to its support for terrorism is our greatest obstacle in this war - and our enemies’ greatest advantage.

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This is a strange war. Our successes in avoiding attack convince some that the real danger has passed. And when we kill jihadists abroad, we are told it is peripheral to the war or only incites more terrorism.

But despite the current efforts at denial, the war against Islamic terrorism remains real and deadly. We can’t wish it away until Middle Eastern dictatorships reform - or we end their oil stranglehold over the world economy.

This example of analyzing the limits of a metaphor is not particularly exceptional in any way. What is interesting about it is the way the argument is spread across the text. Each sentence of the text makes sense within the context of the metaphor but the metaphor itself if explicitly called out at the start and at the end. The middle of the text is simply descriptive but descriptive in such a way that the images all feed into the imagery triggered by the metaphor. This is not particularly surprising but it is rather illustrative of the role of conceptual patterns in the construction of the texture (cohesive harmony) of a text.