As the war in Afghanistan expands, the Obama administration has distanced itself from Bush-era phrases like “the war on terror.”

By PETER BAKER


WASHINGTON - When President Obama recently briefed Congressional leaders at the White House on his plans to send more troops to Afghanistan, Senator Harry Reid offered some advice: Whatever you do, he told the president, do not call it a“surge.”

Not to worry. Mr.Obama did not and would not. The exchange, confirmed by people briefed on the discussion, underscored the sensitivity about language in the new administration. Mr.Obama and his team are busily scrubbing former President George W.Bush’s national security lexicon, if not necessarily all of his policies.

They may be sending 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, much as Mr.Bush did to Iraq, but it is not a “surge.”They may still be holding people captured on the battlefield at the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but these captives are no longer“enemy combatants.”They may be carrying the fight to Al Qaeda as their predecessors did, but they are no longer waging a“war on terror.”

So if not a war on terror, what then?

“Overseas contingency operations.”

And terrorist attacks themselves?

“Man-caused disasters.”

Every White House picks its words carefully, using poll-tested, focusgrouped language to frame issues and ideas to advance its goals.
Mr.Bush’s team did that assertively. The initial legislation expanding government power after the attacks of September 11, 2001, was called the USA Patriot Act. The eavesdropping without warrants that became so controversial was rebranded the Terrorist Surveillance Program. The enemy was, for a time, dubbed“Islamofascism,”until that was deemed insensitive to Muslims.

Mr.Obama has come into office determined to sweep all that language away, even if he is keeping much of the policy that underlies it. Aides argue that they are not trying to spin their priorities through words, but rather trying to excise the spin applied relentlessly by the Bush administration. But they are also trying to send an unmistakable message that the old order is gone.

“You have to tell the American public and the world that there’s a new sheriff in town without opening up the jail and letting all the prisoners out,”said Matt Bennett, vice president of Third Way, a moderate Democratic advocacy group.

Indeed, for all the shifting words, Mr.Obama has left the bulk of Mr.Bush’s national security architecture intact so far. He has made no move to revise the Patriot Act or the eavesdropping program. He has ordered the Guantanamo prison to be closed in a year but has not settled on an alternative way to house inmates deemed to be truly dangerous.

Obama advisers said they were not trying to de-emphasize the danger of extremism but to take the politics out of it. But the risk, in the minds of some critics, is looking like the government no longer takes the dangers of the world seriously.

“An Orwellian euphemism or two will not change the fact that bad people want to kill us and destroy us as a free people,”said Shannen W.Coffin, who served as counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney.

The White House dismisses such criticism, saying the president is not focused on wordsmithing national policy.

“He’s far less concerned with”language, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, told reporters recently,“and much more concerned with steps that he’s taken and that we need to take as a country to protect our citizens and to keep our homeland safe.”