Politics & Power Quote by Dinesh D'Souza

The jab lands because it punctures a slogan that was designed to feel morally self-evident. By calling “war on terror” a misnomer, D’Souza is not disputing that terrorism is evil; he’s disputing that it’s a coherent enemy. The comparison to “kamikazism” is a deliberately awkward word choice meant to expose how strange it is to declare war on a method rather than on a state, ideology, or army. If kamikaze attacks were a tactic within a broader conflict, the logic goes, then terrorism is similarly an instrument inside a larger political struggle. The rhetorical move is to reframe post-9/11 language from clarity to category error.

The subtext is strategic: once you concede that terrorism is merely a tactic, you’re pushed toward asking what the real war is actually about. Is it a war on Islamist militancy? On certain regimes? On a transnational movement? That shift matters because tactics can be adopted by many actors; you can’t “defeat” them the way you can topple a government. You can only reduce their appeal, capacity, and payoff.

Context does the rest of the work. “War on terror” was branding as much as policy, a phrase that fused grief, unity, and permission for open-ended action. D’Souza’s formulation pushes back against that open-endedness, implying that the phrase smuggles in indefinite horizons: if terror is a tactic, then the war never ends, because the category can never be eliminated. The line reads like a semantic correction, but it’s really an argument about limits, targets, and the political uses of imprecise language.