Word: al-qaeda
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...Bush stopped there, everything would be different today. But a few minutes later, he made this fateful pivot: "Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there." After that, Bush mentioned terror, terrorists or terrorism 18 times more. But he didn't mention al-Qaeda again. When he returned to Congress a few months later for his January 2002 State of the Union address, he cited Hamas, Hizballah, Islamic Jihad, North Korea, Iran and Iraq and employed variations of the word terror 34 times. But he mentioned al-Qaeda only once...
...Obama, this is the original sin whose consequences must now be repaired. His foreign policy in the greater Middle East amounts to an elaborate effort to peel back eight years of onion in hopes of finding the war on terrorism's lost inner core: the struggle against al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda alone. That's the subtext underlying his new Afghan strategy. He's raising troop levels, but less to vanquish the Taliban than to gain the leverage to effectively negotiate with them - in hopes of isolating alQaeda from its Afghan allies. He's boosting America's means but narrowing...
...vague and murky war on terrorism everywhere." Team Obama has junked the phrase war on terror, not to mention Islamofascism. And the World War II and Cold War analogies have mostly ceased. Even in Afghanistan, Obama has sharply narrowed the U.S.'s goals. While still aiming to "defeat al-Qaeda," we're now trying only to "reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government." In other words, we'll tolerate Taliban control over large chunks of the Afghan countryside...
...Narrowing the Struggle Practically, this exercise in subtraction starts with Iran. By defining the U.S.'s enemy as "terror," Bush implied that Iran was as big a problem as al-Qaeda. After all, Tehran's mullahs began sponsoring terrorism before al-Qaeda was even born. In so doing, Bush made normal relations with the Islamic Republic virtually impossible. While he didn't actually declare war on Tehran, he initiated the coldest of cold wars: threats of force, no diplomacy and an ideological campaign aimed at making the regime crack...
...Obama's narrower struggle against al-Qaeda, however, a cold war with Tehran makes little sense. For all its nastiness, the Iranian regime doesn't direct its terrorism against the U.S. And Iran's Shi'ite theocrats have a mostly hostile relationship with the anti-Shi'ite theocrats of al-Qaeda. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran has caused trouble for the U.S. largely out of fear that if the U.S. prevails in those countries, Iran will be next. But the Obama Administration seems to believe that if the U.S. can convince Iran's regime that it's not next...