Secretary of State John Kerry insists that we not call the thing by its proper name. The “thing” being U.S. military actions against ISIS (or ISIL, if you wish) and the name being “war.”
But as CNN reports:
John Kerry on Thursday would not say the United States is at war with ISIS, telling CNN in an interview that the administration’s strategy includes “many different things that one doesn’t think of normally in context of war.”
“What we are doing is engaging in a very significant counterterrorism operation,” Kerry told CNN’s Elise Labott in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. “It’s going to go on for some period of time. If somebody wants to think about it as being a war with ISIL, they can do so, but the fact is it’s a major counterterrorism operation that will have many different moving parts.”
“What we are doing is engaging in a very significant counterterrorism operation,” Kerry told CNN’s Elise Labott in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. “It’s going to go on for some period of time. If somebody wants to think about it as being a war with ISIL, they can do so, but the fact is it’s a major counterterrorism operation that will have many different moving parts.”
As the famous line goes: Truth is the first casualty of war.
Calling it something else doesn’t change even that.
Especially that. Perhaps Secretary Kerry should consider the words of General Sherman:
“War is cruelty, you cannot refine it.”
Or redefine it.
