Obama Aide Declares End to War on Terrorism:

[Robin Landseadel]

Considering the deeply symbolic importance of this day and noting some  
of Pynchon's larger geo-political considerations in Gravity's Rainbow  
[and other books], this seems quite relevant:

Obama Aide Declares End to War on Terrorism
New Approach to Focus on Root Economic and Social Causes

By SPENCER ACKERMAN 8/6/09 4:10 PM

John Brennan picked a deeply symbolic day to end the “war on terrorism.”
On August 6, 2001, Brennan, then a senior CIA official and now  
President Obama’s assistant for counterterrorism and homeland  
security, “read warnings that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike  
inside the U.S., but our government was unable to prevent the worst  
terrorist attack in American history,” he recalled to an audience  
Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a  
Washington think tank. It was a reference to a CIA analysis, called a  
President’s Daily Brief, that the 9/11 Commission uncovered as a key  
warning that an attack by al-Qaeda was likely.

Eight years later, in his first speech since joining the Obama  
administration, Brennan annulled several key aspects of the so-called  
war on terrorism — starting with both the name and the idea that the  
U.S. was involved in any sort of “global war.” Brennan said Obama will  
subordinate counterterrorism to “its right and proper place” as a  
“vital part” of the administration’s national security and foreign  
policies, but not the lion’s share of them. Saying he was careful not  
to elevate al-Qaeda to a greater position of importance than it  
deserved, Brennan linked the rise in support for extremists to  
problems of global governance, economic crisis and social  
stratification and said the administration would make a concerted  
effort to address what he considers those extremist root causes.

Above all, Brennan emphasized that the U.S. was not locked in a  
struggle with the world’s billion Muslims. He derided al-Qaeda’s self- 
presentation as a “highly organized, global entity capable of  
replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate,” and said that  
the administration would abandon the use of the word “jihad” in  
reference to al-Qaeda, since the term carries “religious legitimacy”  
in the Muslim world that al-Qaeda’s “murderers… desperately seek but  
in no way deserve.” David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert and  
former adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in  
the Middle East and South Asia, has recently argued in an influential  
book that the U.S. has insufficiently distinguished between implacable  
enemies and those who fight out of opportunism, desperation or other,  
non-eschatological reasons. . .

http://washingtonindependent.com/54152/obama-aide-declares-end-to-war-on-terrorism