Mom, Apple Pie, and the Overseas Contingency Operation

I wish I were making this up — but no such luck. The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration has renamed the Global War on Terror. Apparently it is no longer a war, nor is terror worth mentioning. It is now the “Overseas Contingency Operation.”

Or, I suppose, if you want something a little snappier, the OCO.

If we could only persuade America’s enemies to use language like that, we’d win. Overcome with polysyllabic confusion, they’d spend most of their time wondering who they are fighting, or why.

As it is, my heart goes out to the brave American men and women fighting on the front lines of a very real war, who are now risking their lives not in the Global War on Terror, or World War IV, but in the Overseas Contingency Operation. Is that what Obama will still be calling it after the next attack on America’s shores?

Over at Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer does a neat summing up:

“And so now we are engaged in a great Overseas Contingency Operation, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. And be assured: if the Overseas Contingency Operatives succeed in pulling off another Contingency Operation on American soil on the scale of 9/11, or more than one, we will indeed be sorely tested — and utterly unprepared to meet the multifaceted cultural, military, political, and spiritual challenge the enemy presents.”