What do you get when you are against fighting and for talking with crazy dictators while you are running for high office, yet decide to fight the elected leader of a country which is no threat to anyone outside its own borders and did nothing against anyone in NATO?

You get SCIENCE!

But there is precedent in calling 'hammering a small country' something besides 'war' - the Bush administration, which apparently did not get enough credit for its endorsement of science and engineering, it seems, came up with an engineering-y way to describe war; "kinetic military action".
 
Kinetic energy, of course, is energy in motion, as you all know.  But Washington bureaucrats, being, well, dumb, also invented "non-kinetic" energy, which is apparently different than "potential", to describe warfare.    Non-kinetic warfare is warfare that is not actually killing people at the moment but rather things like cyber-warfare, just hacking their email and sending them forwarded lawyer jokes and what not.

Timothy Noah in Slate even found an example of Donald Rumsfeld using both kinetic and non-kinetic at the same time in a speech.   Who says Rumsfeld is not nuanced??  Noah also lists other silly "retronyms" - unnecessary distinctions that became necessary - like 'acoustic guitar', 'analog watch' and 'two-parent family', so 'non-kinetic' will not feel lonely.   Kinetic military action has plenty of friends in the current administration too.  If you're the family member of anyone killed in the U.S. and France's imperialist kinetics in Libya, please accept my sympathies.