It’s official:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the Obama administration has stopped using “war on terror,” breaking with the Bush administration’s terminology in describing the conflict with al Qaeda and militant Islam.

“The administration has stopped using the phrase, and I think that speaks for itself,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters as she traveled here for a United Nations-led conference on Afghanistan.

Substantive comment: perhaps we can have greater precision about what it is we’re fighting.

In 2002, Nicholas Lemann wrote an insightful piece for The New Yorker lamenting how the Bush administration linguistically committed the United States to a broader war against an amorphous foe by using the “war on terror” formulation, rather than focusing on the actually existing al-Qaeda phenomenon, which is dangerous and multifaceted enough. It was noteworthy to see President Obama define the objectives of his Af-Pak strategy around al-Qaeda — not its Taliban adjuncts, but al-Qaeda, since the United States’ interest in confronting the Taliban is a derivative of its interest in confronting al-Qaeda — and not a slipperier term.

I don’t know if the phrase Brian Beutler has reported on, “overseas contingency operation,” is going to be the replacement term, since that appears to describe discrete campaigns. But it’s probably better to simply state that the United States is at war with al-Qaeda, because it is. Not Hezbollah, not Hamas, not the Sadrist current and so forth; but al-Qaeda.

Super-substantive comment: Hey yo, John Nagl. You should take this change personally.