'War on terror': a short history of three little words
Updated on 15 January 2009
The foreign secretary, David Miliband, describes the notion of a "war on terror" as mistaken - but how have politicians used the phrase in the past?
Miliband called today for the end of an idea of a "war against terror", saying the phrase gave an incorrect impression of a "unified, transnational enemy" rather than a series of disparate terrorist groups.
"The phrase had some merit: it captured the gravity of the threats, the need for solidarity, and the need to respond urgently - where necessary, with force," Miliband wrote in The Guardian today. "But ultimately, the notion is misleading and mistaken."
Phrasing in
Five days after the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001, then-prime minister Tony Blair declared the UK "at war with terrorism".
"Whatever the technical or legal issues about a declaration of war, the fact is we are at war with terrorism," he said.
President Bush used similar language across the Atlantic.
"Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there," he told Congress and the American people on 20 September 2001. "It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."
Watch Jon Snow interview David Miliband
As Blair's official biography on the Number 10 website puts it: "The attacks in New York and Washington of 11 September 2001 meant that much of his second term focused on foreign policy issues - notably the 'war on terror', which began in Afghanistan following the attacks, and the war in Iraq."
Tony Blair used variants of the phrase - most commonly "war against terrorism" in parliament several times in the next three years.
For example, he talked of the need for emergency legislation "so that we can prosecute the war against terrorism successfully in this country as well as abroad" at prime minister's questions on 12 December 2001.
In a statement on the Bali bombings on 15 October 2002, he described the attacks as "a fresh reminder, if we needed one, that the war against terrorism is not over".
In September 2004, he talked of the war in relation to, though reaching further than, Britain's recent military operations:
"I mentioned operations in Iraq and Afghanistan earlier as part of the front line in the war against terrorism, and it is also true to say that progress in the middle east would make an enormous difference to the ability to recruit people to international terrorism."
The phrase was used elsewhere in official parlance in the years immediately after September 11.
For example, then-chancellor Gordon Brown detailed the cost of the "war against terror", including in Afghanistan and Iraq, in 2003's pre-budget report.
And again in July 2004, the Commons foreign affairs select committee released a report titled Foreign Policy Aspects of the War against Terrorism.
Phrasing out
In August 2006, Blair made a speech to the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles calling for a "renaissance of our strategy to defeat those that threaten us".
"The point is this," he said. "This is war, but of a completely unconventional kind."
He described terrorist attacks ranging from 9/11 and the 7/7 London bombings to the conflict in Lebanon and Palestine, as "all part of the same thing", though once the hostilities were halted, he said an "alliance of moderation" would be needed to defeat the "arc of extremism" stretching across the Middle East and beyond.
It was battle language, though not quite as we knew it.
A few months later, Gordon Brown talked of the war on terror in an article for The Sun.
"So, as well as supporting our police, security services and armed forces in the front line of the war on terror at home and abroad, we also need to mobilise the power of argument and ideas to expose and defeat the ideology of hate," said the piece, published three days before the fifth anniversary of the 11 September attacks.
The Foreign Office reportedly advised ministers to stop using the phrase in October 2006.
"In the UK, we do not use the phrase 'war on terror' because we can't win by military means alone, and because this isn't us against one organised enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives," international development secretary Hilary Benn told a meeting in New York in April 2007.
As recently as November 2008, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, used the phrase "war on terror" - although he used it to call for a new order, a similar line of argument to that he makes today.
"Nor is there a single threat or enemy, be it communism or the war on terror," he said. "The sources of disorder are multiple, from weak states and from strong states, and from the failure of states to cooperate over shared threats."
