What is War on Terror?

The War on Terror is a term used to describe the U.S.-led ideological and military campaigns against terrorism, which is most often pinned on individuals from and countries in the Middle East. According to Mishra, the fact that terrorism is unjustifiably viewed from an exclusively Islam-centric lens is a sign that the Western elite have lost their ability to deal with the real problem of terrorism without alienating large groups of people in the world. The War on Terror has justified the curtailment of civil rights in the U.S. even while American elite proclaim countries in the Middle East to be the 'despotic' ones. Mishra writes that the "uncodified and unbridled violence of the ‘war on terror’ ushered in the present era of absolute enmity in which the adversaries, scornful of all compromise, seek to annihilate each other” (132).