I always said you can't declare war on a noun

It was one of the most idiotic phrases to come out of the Bush administration.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, today argues that the use of the "war on terror" as a western rallying cry since the September 11 attacks has been a mistake that may have caused "more harm than good".

In an article in today's Guardian, five days before the Bush administration leaves the White House, Miliband delivers a comprehensive critique of its defining mission, saying the war on terror was misconceived and that the west cannot "kill its way" out of the threats it faces.

British officials quietly stopped using the phrase "war on terror" in 2006, but this is the first time it has been comprehensively discarded in the most outspoken remarks on US counterterrorism strategy to date by a British minister.

In remarks that will also be made in a speech today in Mumbai, in one of the hotels that was a target of terrorist attacks in November, the foreign secretary says the concept of a war on terror is "misleading and mistaken".

"Historians will judge whether it has done more harm than good," Miliband says, adding that, in his opinion, the whole strategy has been dangerously counterproductive, helping otherwise disparate groups find common cause against the west.

"The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common," Miliband argues, in a clear reference to the signature rhetoric of the Bush era. "We should expose their claim to a compelling and overarching explanation and narrative as the lie that it is."

"Terrorism is a deadly tactic, not an institution or an ideology," he says.

Bush's 'You're either for us or against us'; 'Bring it on'; and 'Wanted, dead or alive' quotes all reflect the bizarre simpleton thinking of the neocons. Sweeping up everybody who doesn't like us into a big pile and treating everyone the same loses the ability for using diplomacy, nuance, tolerance, and the capability of addressing wrongs. Wanting the world to be black or white, good or evil, wrong or right will not make it so. Acting like it is is even worse.

Intellectually bankrupt is just a really polite and very British way of saying

That Rumsfeld and Bush are fucking stupid:

Commentators in the US media have been suggesting for weeks that the British have failed in Iraq and are preparing to flee. Britain's Defence Secretary Des Browne and Foreign Secretary David Miliband took the unusual step of publishing an editorial in the Washington Post last week defending the UK's role in Iraq. "We believe we remain on track to complete the return of full sovereignty to the Iraqi people as planned," they wrote. "The United Kingdom is sticking to the mission we took on four years ago."

Then, over the weekend, two retired senior British officers upped the ante by lashing out at what they see as US incompetence in Iraq. Maj. Gen. Tim Cross, who was Britain's most senior officer involved in reconstruction efforts in Iraq, said he had talked to former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the need to have international support and enough troops on the ground to reconstruct the country. "He didn't want to hear that message. The US had already convinced themselves that Iraq would emerge reasonably quickly as a stable democracy," he told the Sunday Mirror. "Anybody who tried to tell them anything that challenged that idea -- they simply shut out."

His comments came a day after the Daily Telegraph quoted Gen. Mike Jackson, commander of the British army during the invasion, describing Rumsfeld's policy as "intellectually bankrupt" and criticizing the Pentagon for discarding detailed plans drawn up by the State Deparment for post-conflict Iraq. "It was an ideological article of faith that the coalition soldiers would be accepted as a liberating army," he writes in his forthcoming autobiography which is being serialized by the newspaper.