It's The Substance, Stupid

Anyone who does much discursive writing sooner or later realizes that difficulty in articulation is usually a sign, not of writer's block or of an inability to "find the right words," but of confusion over the substance of what is being discussed. Judge John Roberts made exactly this point in his response to Congressional questions he submitted yesterday:

"I and most judges have had the experience of attempting to draft an opinion that would just 'not write' - because the analysis could not withstand the discipline of careful, written exposition," he wrote, adding that when that happens, it is time to revisit the issue.

The Bush Administration is having the same sort of problem in finding a labelfor what we are doing vis-a-vis "terrorism" :

President Bush publicly overruled some of his top advisers on Wednesday in a debate about what to call the conflict with Islamic extremists, saying, "Make no mistake about it, we are at war."

In a speech here, Mr. Bush used the phrase "war on terror" no less than five times. Not once did he refer to the "global struggle against violent extremism," the wording consciously adopted by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other officials in recent weeks after internal deliberations about the best way to communicate how the United States views the challenge it is facing.

In recent public appearances, Mr. Rumsfeld and senior military officers have avoided formulations using the word "war," and some of Mr. Bush's top advisers have suggested that the administration wanted to jettison what had been its semiofficial wording of choice, "the global war on terror."

In an interview last week about the new wording, Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, said that the conflict was "more than just a military war on terror" and that the United States needed to counter "the gloomy vision" of the extremists and "offer a positive alternative."

. . . .

[But, even] Mr. Bush made a nod to the criticism that "war on terror" was a misleading phrase in the sense that the enemy is not terrorism, but those who used it to achieve their goals. In doing so, he used the word "war," as he did at least 13 other times in his 47-minute speech, most of which was about domestic policy.

"Make no mistake about it, this is a war against people who profess an ideology, and they use terror as a means to achieve their objectives," he said.

Hmmm. Well, THAT clears things up!

The problem here is not the language, it is the substance. The difficulty in coming up with an appropriate label is simply a reflection of the fact that the Administration has no clear vision as to what it is doing or what it hopes to accomplish.