Opinion: In today’s pages: Renaming the war on terror, liberating Ted Stevens and scrutinizing workers’ compensation
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The Obama administration has abandoned the ‘war on terror’ -- semantically, that is -- and author Reza Aslan says good riddance. In a pointed Op-Ed, Aslan argues that the phrase was counterproductive:
By lumping together the disparate forces, movements, armies, ideas and grievances of the greater Muslim world, from Morocco to Malaysia; by placing them in a single category (‘enemy’), assigning them a single identity (‘terrorist’); and by countering them with a single strategy (war), the Bush administration seemed to be making a blatant statement that the war on terror was, in fact, ‘a war against Islam.’ That is certainly how the conflict has been viewed by a majority in four major Muslim countries -- Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan and Indonesia -- in a worldpublicopinion.org poll in 2007. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they believe that the purpose of the war on terror is to ‘spread Christianity in the region’ of the Middle East.
Also on the Op-Ed page, former Justice Department attorney David B. Rivkin Jr. bemoans the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to examine a West Virginia Supreme Court judge’s refusal to recuse himself from a case involving his largest campaign contributor, and columnist Tim Rutten calls on the Los Angeles Unified School District to entrust its over-budget and behind-schedule arts campus downtown to a competent charter-school company.
On the other side of the Opinion divide, the Times editorial board again urges Washington to push Iraqi’s Shiite-led government to reconcile with former Sunni insurgents. It shows little sympathy for former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), despite the prosecutorial misconduct that contributed to his defeat at the polls in November. And it calls on Sacramento to scrutinize why medical care costs in the workers’ compensation system are rising so rapidly:
...[T]he mechanisms that insurers use to keep a lid on healthcare expenses are becoming increasingly expensive. And no wonder -- in the overhauled workers’ comp system, more people are likely to review an injured worker’s paperwork than his X-rays.