John Bellinger, the State Department's legal adviser, is blogging at Opinio Juris, and introduces a new meaning for an old term:

The phrase "the global war on terror"—to which some have objected-- is not intended to be a legal statement. The United States does not believe that it is engaged in a legal state of armed conflict at all times with every terrorist group in the world, regardless of the group’s reach or its aims, or even with all of the groups on the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Nor is military force the appropriate response in every situation across the globe. When we state that there is a “global war on terror,” we primarily mean that the scourge of terrorism is a global problem that the international community must recognize and work together to eliminate.

This is, to the best of my recollection, just not true. The "global" in GWOT is first meant to signify that we'll act globally against the terrorists, as opposed to any one particular theatre of war. Secondly it's meant to say that the enemy is, as the old phrase used to have it, "every terrorist group of global reach." (In fact, that very line from Bush's September 20, 2001 speech to Congress held that the GWOT "will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated." Bellinger, like most intelligent people, figures that Bush can't possibly mean what he said, and judging by his actions, he doesn't.) I suppose a third-order meaning might be that it's the fight of the globe, and not just America, but to substitute that nice mulitilateralist meaning for the one that everyone understood until Bellinger's blog post is a bit rich.