Along with the 'war on drugs', the Obama administration has indicated that it will be abandoning the term 'war on terror' and replacing it with
'overseas contingency operation'. As one whose own research interests focus on the political uses of language and shifts in the terms of discourse, this struck me as an important development, but not in the way that you might think.
Rather than marking a clear break with the 'war on terror' that will always be identified with the Bush Administration--even though the term was first used during the waning years of the Reagan administration--a careful analysis of the term 'overseas contingency operation' reveals that it shares many of the same foundations of the 'war on terror'. The difference is that it couches these foundations in what Carol Cohn has called 'technostrategic discourse' by using less emotive and affective language to occlude the violent implications and consequences of waging unending war.
First the word overseas as a descriptor positions 'terror' as something that originates from outside the boundaries of the United
States. This represents the use of terror as foreign and alien to American society. By the same turn, it reinforces the notion of the United States being naturally safe and free of internal danger except in those instances when forces originating from the outside (e.g., terrorists, illegal immigrants, drug peddlers) are able to get in. Moreover, it reinforces the very idea of the outside as a place--and source of-- all of the threats facing the United States. Thus, like the 'war on terror' this signals the continuing hyper-assertion of sovereignty at home--for example, tighter border defenses--and the hyper-denial of sovereignty abroad in order to eliminate perceived dangers.
Second, the term contingency is used to represent risk which can be defined in terms of a susceptibility to something--in this case, terrorism. And as Nikolas Rose has noted in The Politics of Life Itself, in contemporary society susceptibility is linked to a concurrent responsibility to reduce the probability of a susceptibility becoming manifest. This is accomplished through practices of proactive enhancement--for example, targeted killings committed by American forces using Predator drone planes.
At the same time, contingency can also mean 'emergency'. This makes the use of force 'overseas' seem exceptional rather than the usual state of affairs. Moreover, by combining notions of susceptibility and emergency, the term contingency neatly divests any sense of responsibility and accountability from the effects and affects of previous foreign policy postures or the humiliations of global history. In other words, threats are represented as emerging almost spontaneously outside the borders of the United States, and therefore efforts must be directed to eliminating them as they arise, rather than considering what makes them possible.
Finally, 'operation' is both a medical and military term to describe a series of actions taken to remedy an illness or meet specific strategic objectives. Therefore it implies a (pro)active rather than passive orientation to global affairs. But rather than conjuring the images of chaos and anarchy associated with war, an 'operation' can be represented as controlled, surgical, reasoned, well-planned, and precise. Perhaps unsurprisingly this is very much the same imagery that the American military has forwarded of the revolution in military affairs that includes the use of weapon systems like 'smart bombs' that reduce levels of 'collateral damage'.
So what does this mean practically? In part, this shift in terms of discourse ties into the cultural realm-- for the moment, US citizens have tired of the 'war on terror's' promised cycles of endless war and revenge. The term 'overseas contingency operation' frames
the foreign policy orientation of the Obama administration as more measured. However, it
disavows virtually none of the foundations of Bush era foreign policy including the use of pre-emptive strikes, violence as the primary means of achieving security, or an a-historical world view prone to Manichean distinctions between threat and opportunity. Thus, we have the continuation of total war by another name.
The graphic above by Mike Licht is being displayed under the terms of a CreativeCommons license.
