Hours after the September 11, 2001 attacks, US President George W. Bush declared "war on terrorism." In August 2004, he said that was the wrong label, but then quickly re-embraced it.
This week, Bush again went on the defensive over the succinct but powerful phrase after Democrats looking to succeed him assailed it as a catch-all used by the White House to justify outrages and blunders as well as browbeat political opponents.
Former senator John Edwards blasted Bush's "war on terrorism" line as a rhetorical "sledgehammer" in a speech.
"He has used this doctrine like a sledgehammer to justify the worst abuses and biggest mistakes of his administration, from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, to the war in Iraq," said Edwards, who seeks the presidency in the 2008 elections.
"It’s a bumper sticker, not a plan. It has damaged our alliances and weakened our standing in the world -- it’s been used to justify everything from the Iraq War to Guantanamo to illegal spying on the American people."
Edwards, the Democrats' vice presidential pick in 2004, was among the White House hopefuls who signalled at a recent candidates' debate that they did not believe in the "global war on terrorism."
The Democratic front-runners, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, signalled in a show-of-hands exercise that they did. In all, four enlisted behind the concept, and four did not.
Perhaps stung by Edwards' words and the rejection of one of the defining terms of his administration, Bush fired back at a press conference Thursday: "This notion about how this isn't a war on terror, in my view, is naive."
"It doesn't reflect the true nature of the world in which we live," he said.
But that wasn't always Bush's position: for a brief moment in August 2004, the president declared that "we actually misnamed the 'war on terror.'"
"It ought to be 'the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world,'" he said in a speech.
One day later, he was using the label again.
Staunch US ally Britain, however, has dropped the label -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair referred during a White House visit last week to the US "fight" or "battle" against terrorism but did not use the phrase.
Bush appears to have first used the expression in a five-minute address hours after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and it quickly gained so much currency that the Democratic National Committee still uses it.
The White House says that it comprises diplomatic and military efforts to roll back extremism -- everything from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to intelligence gathering, to helping weak governments crack down on extremists.
The president has also referred to it as his "doctrine" that "if you harbor a terrorist, you're just as guilty as the terrorist" -- the underpinning of the strike-first military approach he champions.
It has been so unavoidable that critics of the president and the war -- including John Edwards -- have themselves made generous use of the term at times over the nearly six years since September 11.
But it is getting a new life as a political football in the race to win the presidency in 2008.
The political dimension is clear: Republican White House hopeful Rudy Giuliani this week used Edwards' attack on the term to charge that the Democrats were "in denial" about the global struggle.
But just two months earlier, Giuliani himself assailed the term, saying "this is a terrorist war against us."
"We kind of have to get it into our mentality and into our policies and stop sort of feeding the idea that this is a war of our choice," he said.
At the Edwards campaign, spokesman Mark Kornblau says the former senator has "no official shorthand" for the package of policies he would enact if elected but, when pressed adds: "He calls it 'Keeping America Safe.'"
