Kinbote's Law, again

Some time ago, supergee made a reference to a famous law of literary criticism which he had just made up: Kinbote's Law, which says that with sufficient effort and ingenuity, any narrative can be found hiding within another narrative. (The law is named after the enigmatic character at the core of Nabokov's Pale Fire.)

I soon realized that Kibote's Law can be applied to the study of history: With sufficient effort (and enough elision of detail), any historical or current situation can be made to resemble any other. One of the best demonstrations of this was given by Jim Henley back in January 2003, on the eve of the War On Iraq:

Warblogger Mad Libs--In every article referring to "appeasement," the allies, and Hitler, substitute "Austria-Hungary" for the allies and "Serbia" for Hitler. Change "WWII" to "WWI." Laugh till the pee warms your calves.

I was brought to mind of this today by an amusing analogy from Gene Lyons, brought to my attention by Avedon:

Since everybody’s so fond of World War II analogies, here’s mine: Iraq is Dunkirk. If we want to win the greater war, we need to pull out ASAP. We’re overextended, overexposed and surrounded. The U.S. never sent enough troops to begin with and reinforcements aren’t coming.

We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them on the flypaper....

The War [preposition] Terror

Also Avedon:

Stop calling it "the war on terror". Just stop. You can refer to what the administration is doing as "the war of terror", or maybe just "the terror war", but for the rest of us, it is just the project to reduce terrorism, and that is something completely different.

While it's tempting to try to mad-lib random prepositions into my subject (The War beyond Terror; The War without Terror; The War worth Terror; The War throughout Terror), there's actually a more serious rephrasing that Avedon's comment leads to:

Bush and his cronies want to fight terrorism. Sane people want to stop terrorism. These aren't the same goal, and the things which lead to the first don't lead to the second.

(The War against Terror. That's the one worth fighting. But it's not the same as The War against Terrorists.)