It's odd how we can be at war with them, or they can be at war with us, and the term doesn't give any indication on which one is the one being attacked, or where the war is taking place.

I guess it's because before roughly 300 years ago, wars were things that happened on mutual borders, so it didn't matter as much who started it, as both populaces felt the real effects of the struggle. Certainly many wars are still like this, and there are terms for it, 'border conflict' for example. We have 'civil war,' and 'coup' for an internal struggle, but we don't really have words for some of the modern faces war takes on.

Consider that war almost always involved the desire to acquire land. This is a natural reason for wars to happen along borders, to push them one way or another. Distant wars, the Falklands War, the Revolutionary War, though not attached to the 'mother country' were still about gaining or keeping ownership of land.

I guess the change started with allies. In WW I and WW II we were allies to various countries under siege, and after winning the war, these governments were either solidified or reinstated. It wasn't about the US getting more land, even in the countries that surrendered. Sure there were places where land was divvied (East/West Germany and Israel to name a few), but the US wasn't going for a land grab.

Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan. All these wars involved massive US troops on foreign soil for reasons having nothing to do with gaining territory, but to enforce ideology and, in the larger sense, decrease future threats to our own country.

'War' is a great umbrella term, and maybe there's a more specific term that's just slipping out of my mind at the moment, but I can't think of it.

Now that I'm ending this post, I'll confess that I didn't really have a point. It just seems that, evidenced by the stupid names CNN, ABC, et al have for this 'military action' we need to do what English-speakers do best, and expand our vocabulary with a few new terms.