Will "war on terror" survive without Bush?

By Matt Spetalnick - Analysis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The "decider" is gone. "Axis of evil" is out. Can "war on terror" be far behind?

As U.S. President Barack Obama moves to roll back his predecessor's rhetoric as well as his policies, the phrase that came to define George W. Bush's post-September 11 call to arms is losing ground in the war of words.

While the new administration hasn't dumped "war on terror" from its vocabulary, there are signs that use of the term has been deliberately limited as Obama seeks to repair the United States' image abroad, especially in the Muslim world.

"It may be only symbolic but it signals that Obama is serious about avoiding the kind of Bush-style foreign policy that proved so divisive," said historian David Greenberg, an expert on presidential communication at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Bush first spoke of a "war on terror" after the September 11 attacks of 2001, turning it into his administration's shorthand for what he envisioned as a broad, U.S.-led global fight against al Qaeda and allied Islamist groups.

But the approach soon became controversial because of what international critics saw as an arrogant with-us-or-against-us philosophy overly dependent on military force and what many Muslims decried as an attack on Islam.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and the U.S. military detention camp at Guantanamo drew more overseas criticism of Bush's policies.

Since taking office on January 20, Obama has moved swiftly to reverse some of Bush's practices, ordering the closing of Guantanamo and an end to harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects and dispatching a peace envoy to the Middle East.