WASHINGTON, April 4 (UPI) -- Republicans in the U.S. Congress have protested the removal of the phrase "war on terror" from a defense budget bill.
But the Democrat who heads the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives has denounced their protests as a "tempest in a teapot."
The Navy Times reported Tuesday that a memorandum for the staff of the House Armed Services Committee, or HASC, that was distributed last week recommended that the language in the House version of the 2008 House Defense appropriations bill ought to "avoid using colloquialisms" and should therefore eliminate the use of the phrase "global war on terror."
The phrase came into common currency when U.S. President George W. Bush started employing it in his speeches following the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks that killed more than 2,800 people.
The Navy Times said that the memorandum instructed staffers to use language that was as specific as possible and that described individual military operations and events, instead of using such generic terms as "war on terror" or "long war."
Josh Holly, a spokesman for Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., the committee's former chairman and currently the ranking Republican on it, told the Navy Times that the GOP was "not consulted" on the issue.
However, Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the current chairman of the committee, slammed the GOP protests about the change as "the typical Republican leadership attempt to tie together the misadventure in Iraq and the overall war against terrorists."
"Providing our service members with the tools they need to protect the American people is a very serious responsibility," Skelton said. "I'm saddened that some of our GOP colleagues have chosen to create this distraction, which is a tempest in a teapot as far as I'm concerned."
