War/Not War?: Is John Kerry as Stupid as He Sounds? You Be the Judge

Via
Instapundit comes a link to this stunning report from The
Hill:

Secretary of State John Kerry wants you to know that whatever it
is you call it when you drop bombs on people you want to kill, send
troops and advisers to foreign lands to kill and train people, it
isn’t war.

“What we are doing is engaging in a very significant
counterterrorism operation,” Kerry
said. “It’s going to go on for some period of time. If somebody
wants to think about it as being a war with ISIL, they can do so,
but the fact is it’s a major counterterrorism operation that will
have many different moving parts.”

In a separate interview with CBS News, Kerry also rejected the
word “war” to describe the U.S. effort and encouraged the public
not to “get into war fever” over the conflict.

“We’re engaged in a major counterterrorism operation, and it’s
going to be a long-term counterterrorism operation. I think war is
the wrong terminology and analogy but the fact is that we are
engaged in a very significant global effort to curb terrorist
activity,” Kerry
told the network.

“War is the wrong terminology and
analogy?”

That’s beyond sad—it’s insulting to the intelligence of us
all.

And, more important, it’s the sort of doublespeak whose
obfuscations pave the way to greater and greater involvement while
pretending the exact opposite.

If what Obama says we’re about to do in Iraq and Syria to ISIS
isn’t war, then why not send “boots on the ground,” as former CIA
and NSA director
Michael Hayden and a growing chorus of
elected officials are calling for?
Why did Obama argue last year that he needed congressional
authorization to do the same thing to Syria?

Instapundit suggests that Kerry
doesn’t want to call it a war because we might lose it. I actually
think it’s because the administration is delusional and mistakes
its ability to rename things via clever word games for material
reality. Which is far more troubling than simple cowardice or
deceit. Certainly nothing Kerry has said in his new gig argues that
he has a robust sense of reality testing.