How can politicians across the globe get away with saying that they support a 'War on Terror'? How can terrorism possibly be something that can be defeated? We don't try to preemptively stop violent offenders in the developed nations, so why are 'terrorists' people that can be so easily branded and fought against?

I believe that the meaning of the expression "war on terror" contains a metaphor and a judgment, neither of which is explicitly presented as such. This double equivocation has grave political consequences. Let me address each fold of the equivocation separately. The Metaphor of "War." I do not see how, in the "war against terror," "war" is used as anything else than a metaphor, as in the "war against cancer" or the "war against drug-trafficking." In principle, there would be nothing wrong in making use of the metaphor of war to describe the fight against terrorism, and the terror that it produces. Now, given that acts of terrorism are so destabilizing precisely because of their intrinsic production of terror (an individual and collective state of mind), I am not sure that the metaphor of war would be my pick, since it is obvious that it increases, rather than decreases, the production of terror. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, however, by formally "declaring" war on terror, the Bush...