Much like the war on disease and drugs, it is continual and never-ending. It is essentially battling an idea. You can't shoot an idea.
When we are able to view these acts as a "nuisance," like prostitution and illicit drug use, which is not even thought of as a nuisance by many people. In short, when this "war" doesn't seem to govern our national life, as it does today, and has become more of a law enforcement problem. You know, like the pre-9/11 days. After all, don't we all hope to one day live in a world that at least approaches a sense of normalcy? The world has never been "safe." Anyone who thought that was being naive. But for the vast majority of people able to afford to travel the world, as I have, and to have gone to some of the most remote places on earth, as SamFisher did recently in Tibet, or to just go to Europe... we were able to travel with a relative feeling of security. I have known for years that my children wouldn't experience the same quality of life that I have enjoyed, because the world has changed so greatly the last few decades... but I hope that they won't grow up in a life that consists of colored alerts, body checks, and further restrictions of their personal liberty caused by the threat of terrorism. I hope that they come to know those acts as random, and isolated to a few areas of political strife. That was the pre-9/11 world. I hope that one day, it will cease to be a strident part of political campaigning in this country, where you have a President running, not on his record, but on fear, and an opponent running, in part, on his ability to deal with this fear. Fear has been thrust into the center of our national life, in the middle of the fundamental part of our existence in this country, that which makes us different, for good or ill, from the rest of the world... our political process. Using fear to influence people in politics isn't new. LBJ used it quite effectively in 1964. But the extent to which a political campaign is based around fear, as this one is, is something new to my experience. I have watched Presidential elections unfold since 1960, and I have seen nothing like this. Keep D&D Civil!!
Personally, I will know I have won when I end the terror within my own mind. There is no other place or time.
with the way that we are treating it now, it will either be when all the white people or all the brown people are dead. Another way to end an ideological war is to have a bigger one come down on us, such as one with space aliens, robots or, if Bush wins, homosexuals and pagans. at our current plan, we are treating the war on terror similar to how Israel and Palestine are treating their war, and we all know the likelihood of that one ending. You are right to imply that we are treating this ideological war like one with concrete enemies.
I actually think the word "terrorists" would be available for a combo-war in each of those cases, if W wanted to consider a move of efficiency. Robo-terrorists. Space-terrorists. Same-sex-terrorists (A by-gone Houston band called the Party Owls combined a lot of these in a prescient song titled "Sodom Butt Buddies from Outer Space"). Imagine -- four times the fear with a single slogan! Overall, I'm happy with the "war on terror," and I look forward to it justifying cuts in school lunch programs, further degradation of pollution standards, ad nauseum. It will be like absurdist political performance art, in our own time.
