Excerpt:
In the new National Security Strategy released by the White House last month, the Obama administration rightly reaffirms that America remains a nation at war. Unfortunately, it refuses to identify our enemy in this war as what it is: violent Islamist extremism.
This is more than semantics. As military strategists since Sun Tzu have appreciated, the first rule in war is to know your enemy so you can defeat it. The 2006 National Security Strategy did this: It correctly identified our enemy as "the transnational terrorists [who] exploit the proud religion of Islam to serve a violent political vision." The Obama administration removed those accurate and important words.
One argument administration officials use to defend their avoidance of terms like "violent Islamist extremism" is that they are imprecise and lump together a diverse set of organizations with different goals, motivations, and capabilities. Yet the administration's preferred alternative term—"violent extremism"—is much more vulnerable to such criticism.