Trump’s War: The three-letter word no one wants to say

Perhaps it was the comedians on Saturday Night Live who best captured the tiptoeing around what to call the fighting in Iran.

“War? Whoever called this a war?” said cast member Colin Jost in a parody of U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “This isn’t a war,” said Jost as Hegseth. “It’s a situationship. We’re just going to hook up and see where it goes.”

As Gal Beckerman observed in The Atlantic, President Donald Trump and his supporters “have been twisting themselves into semantic pretzels” to describe what’s happening in Iran.

In Trump’s eight-minute video address posted to Truth Social on Feb. 28 announcing U.S.-Israeli air strikes, he said he was launching “major combat operations in Iran.”

Days later, House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted “we’re not at war right now,” but instead, his country was on a “very specific, clear mission—an operation. Operation Epic Fury.”

Trump and others have since let their guard down, using “war” from time to time when speaking about Iran. But their overall reluctance to label this a war is hardly surprising—it fits a long pattern of political leaders showing a profound aversion to the use of the dreaded three-letter word.

 

Even dictators shrink from it. In 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin famously called his invasion of Ukraine “a special military operation.” Russia went so far as to enact a law criminalizing any reference made by journalists to the fighting as a “war” or an “invasion.”

This kind of devious wartime wording might trace its origins back to 1950 and the Korean War, officially labelled a “police action” by U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s administration as a way of circumventing a formal declaration of war by Congress. Instead, Truman opted for a UN Security Council resolution to endorse a U.S.-led coalition aimed at repelling North Korea’s invasion of South Korea.

The so-called “police action” turned into three years of bloody combat and the death of roughly three million people. Tens of thousands of Canadians served in Korea and more than 500 died. Those that came home struggled for years against the public perception that they hadn’t fought in a real war.

A decade later in Vietnam, it was clear to everyone that a war was underway—the nightly TV footage and the body counts made that obvious. Yet despite the loss of 58,000 American casualties, “the Vietnam War is, technically speaking, not considered a war in the United States,” according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, because Congress never formally declared war on either North Vietnam or the Viet Cong.

Fast forward to the “war on terror” that followed the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Here, American leaders tried the same promotional approach to the struggle in Afghanistan as they had in their 1970s “war on drugs” campaign. The U.S. and its allies, they claimed, were broadly engaged in a war against a concept (fighting drugs or terror are vague ideas most people can rally behind) rather than an explicit war against an enemy state, with all the risk and uncertainty that entails.

In both the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror,” political leaders also sought to communicate the intent for an unequivocal outcome: “There was a message being delivered—we are going to expunge this particular problem,” said Jon Greenberg, a faculty member at the U.S.-based Poynter Institute for Media Studies. “That was part of the rhetoric, part of the promise.”

Likewise, said Greenberg, when leaders deliberately avoid the W-word to describe an armed conflict, they do so to sidestep expectations for a specific outcome, including victory.

“If you believe we’re at war, then you are more likely to say, ‘We’re going to win.’ The word ‘war’ carries a defined, desired end point,” said Greenberg. In using the phrase major combat operations, “you give yourself more flexibility on what the end point looks like. That’s part of the way language works.”

In 2006, the fighting in Afghanistan had been underway for five years and a Canadian battle group was in the thick of it in Kandahar. Yet, despite several earlier Canadian fatalities, folks at home—unaccustomed to hearing their politicians and the news media describe the country as being at war—were slow to grasp the reality facing Canadian soldiers.

It wasn’t until Canadian troops began dying at a steady rate in Kandahar in the spring of 2006—arguably starting with the death of Private Robert Costall in a firefight with the Taliban—that Canadians accepted the hard truth that their country was involved not in a “conflict,” a “reconstruction mission” or an “operation,” but a straight-up war.

It wasn’t always like this. Countries and city states once simply called wars what they are, with an unspoken agreement that a formal declaration of war would proceed the start of any hostilities.

“This tradition goes back to antiquity, and also has roots in medieval chivalry,” wrote Katja Ziegler, a professor of international law, in the online journal The Conversation.

The practice of declaring war fell out of favour after the Second World War, said Ziegler, when newly codified international law—specifically the UN Charter—prohibited all use of armed force between states except in the narrow cases of self-defence or others authorized by the UN Security Council.

“War has essentially become entirely unlawful and formal declarations of it are therefore highly unlikely, since they would only risk legal sanction,” said Ziegler. Today, “calling war by its common name has volatile political and emotive consequences.”

War and truth have always been like oil and water. But when countries go to war today and fail to meet even the basic requirement of saying so, Jon Greenberg urges citizens to arm themselves with a healthy supply of skepticism.

“Facts,” he said, “are slippery when bombs, drones and missiles are flying.”