Nearly eighteen months have now passed since the Bush administration sought to re-brand its 'global war on terror' as 'the long war'. In February 2006 the US Department of Defense's Quadrennial Defense Review Report included a section on 'Fighting The Long War'. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defense, sought to present the war on terrorism as 'a generational conflict akin to the Cold War', which lasted for forty-six years (1945-1991).
Mr. Rumsfeld was sacrificed later in 2006 by President Bush as the scapegoat for American failure to make significant progress in the Iraq war, but the wider war against terrorism goes on and the US authorities continue to present it as a struggle that will last for decades.
The international media have never really taken to the new brand name, still preferring 'war on terror' to 'the long war'. In any case, in the context of struggles between the Christian West and the Islamic world, the latter title is already taken. The conflict between the Austrian Habsburgs and the Ottoman Turkish sultan between 1593 and 1606 in the Croatian and Hungarian borderlands is known to historians as the Long War. Yet this largely indecisive thirteen year struggle scarcely deserves such a title when compared with other Christian-Muslim conflicts over the centuries.
Undoubtedly the longest such conflict was the 800 year struggle between the Byzantine Empire and its Muslim ebemies. It began with the Arab invasions in the seventh century and ended in 1453 when the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II stormed Constantinople and killed the last Byzantine emperor. Only a little shorter in duration was the 'Reconquista', the Christian struggle to liberate Spain and Portugal from their Muslim conquerors. Beginning in the rugged mountains of north-western Spain around 720, the conflict did not end until Ferdinand and Isabella, the 'Catholic Monarchs', accepted the surrender of the Muslims of Granada in 1492.
The most famous Christian-Muslim conflict, the Crusades, and the related struggles of the Christian states set up in the Holy Land, barely encompassed two centuiries, ending with the fall of Acre in 1291. In more recent times, the wars between the rising Orthodox Christian empire of Russia and the declining Muslim empire of the Ottoman Turks lasted from the mid-seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. The Russians appeared to triumph, but the empires of both the tsar and the sultan were brought down by their participation in the First World War.
It might be objected that these centuries-long struggles were not continuous, with long periods of truce or declared peace separating outbreaks of hostilities, but the same could be said of the most famous numerically designated wars. The medieval Hundred Years War between England and France was not a continuous struggle, nor was the Eighty Years War in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries when the Dutch successfully struggled to break free from Spanish imperial rule. Similarly the Thirty Years War, the bloody climax of Catholic-Protestant enmity in Europe, is divided into distinct phases, with some periods of peace.
To designate a war that has only been in progress since September 2001 as 'long' seems a little presumptuous when judged against earlier conflicts. In any case most wars receive their enduring historical names long after the event. The only thing that is certain about the presnt conflict is that its end is still not in sight.
