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@chris_crash
"History of usage
The term "Islamism" first appeared in eighteenth-century France as a synonym for "Islam". At the turn of the twentieth century, it was being displaced by the latter, and by 1938, when Orientalist scholars completed the Encyclopaedia of Islam, had virtually disappeared from the English language.[54] According to the Oxford English Dictionary, usage of the term "Islamism" dates back to 1747.
It was given its modern connotation by French academia in the late 1970s, thence to be incorporated into the English language again, where it has largely displaced "Islamic fundamentalism" as the preferred term." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamist#History_of_usage (not the best souce i know)
It does not state that it Replaced Islamic Fundimentalism in the last term of Geroge W. Bush, not the 1970s
the question not asked is why did we sub Islamic fundamentalist for Islamist. i believe the answer is it sounds more like Islam, and to the average person that means Arab, I have known a few people who thought that Islamist was a worshiper of Islam (Muslim was not in their vocabulary), my 10th grade history class was filled with them.
In any conflict situation, you want more people to support you, then your enemy. The easy way to do this is to keep people ignorant of your enemy and create an us vs. them attitude among the populous. In the morden era this may offend sections of the populous (lets call them the educated middle class liberal), if you apse this person by saying you are not against the entire population, but the section that means you harm, ie we are after the Islamist, not Islam (like Hitler being after the Semites and not the Jews), you get bounus points if most of the population cannot understand the difference between the words, and even more points if they sound almost exactly the same.
I have heard US politicians and generals use the phrase Islamist, not Islam often, I cannot recall hearing them say Islamist, not Muslim. their speech writers go over every word of their speeches, and give them a lot of thought, so there has to be a reason they say "Islamist, not Islam" and not the correct "Islamist (or Islamic Fundamentalist) not Muslims". Given that it is in the interest of these politicians, and generals and therefore their speech writers to create an "us vs. them" environment, and incurage ignorance among the populace while not angering the middle class liberals too much, i think it is a fair assumption, and not much of a leap to segust they use the term Islamist, to mean Islam to mean Arab (and genrealy to mean dark skinned).
Just like if Hitler had to avoid the term Jew he would have substituted Semite, and may have tryed to find an even better term like Jewist.