NEW YORK - Britain has stopped using the phrase "war on terror," a British government minister said Monday, in an apparent attempt to distance London from its US allies.
International Development Secretary Hilary Benn said in a speech in New York that the phrase, so often used by US President George W. Bush regarding military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, made small, disparate extremist groups feel part of something bigger.
"In the UK, we do not use the phrase 'war on terror' because we can't win by military means alone, and because this isn't us against one organized enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives," he said.
"It is the vast majority of the people in the world -- of all nationalities and faiths -- against a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world and their idea of being part of something bigger.
"What these groups want is to force their individual and narrow values on others, without dialogue, without debate, through violence. And by letting them feel part of something bigger, we give them strength," he said.
Such open criticism is likely to boost Benn's standing among left-wing sections of Britain's governing Labour Party, which have been unhappy at Prime Minister Tony Blair's close alignment with Washington and involvement in Iraq.
It could also help his candidature for Labour's deputy leadership post, which is to be contested in the coming months.
Elsewhere in the speech, Benn echoed Blair's call for a combination of military means and "soft power" techniques like multilateral aid and development to combat extremism.
He also endorsed Blair's view that the fight against extremism was essentially one of values and ideas.
Bush coined the phrase "war on terror" shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
The Observer newspaper said last December that government ministers and diplomats had been told by the Foreign Office to drop the phrase and others seen liable to anger Muslims and increase tensions in the Islamic world.
A search of the Downing Street website, however, still yielded 157 hits for the phrase on Monday.
04/16/2007 20:39 GMT