Is the word war in the sentence "War is a lie" a metonymy for the word "rhetoric" or "propaganda"?

JAY: So your thesis is War Is a Lie is too long a title. It should-you can't say war without it being a lie. So tell us, what's the basic idea of the book?
SWANSON: That-not that war doesn't exist, of course, but that almost everything we think about war that keeps it going, that gets wars started, that keeps wars prolonged, that justifies wars after the fact, that keeps the war machine, the war economy, the structures of war powers in place is a lie, is dishonest, and follows dishonest themes that have been used for millennia. And so this idea that the Iraq War based on lies was somehow different from other wars, glorious, justified, good wars, is wrong. They are all based on lies. I mean, you just go back through US history, you know, never mind the Iraq War, Bush's father lying about babies thrown out of incubators to get into a Gulf War. Go back to the Gulf of Tonkin incident that never happened. Go back to South Korea invading North Korea, which was not getting military support from the Soviet Union, and we're told the opposite. Go back to the big one, World War II, where this attack on Pearl Harbor-which was not a US state; it was a territory of our empire-was intentionally provoked. We knew it was coming. We were participating in China's war with Japan, we were building bases and air strips around and threatening Japan, and we were imposing horrible economic sanctions in order to provoke.