Jonah takes issue with Susan Sontag’s editorial, in which she frets about “war without end.”

But wars never have a certain ending at the beginning, now do they? That?s why they?re so scary; we never know when they?ll end. Who knew when ? or how — World War Two was going to end? Does that mean it wasn?t a “real war” until it ended? The Hundred Years War must have seemed pretty endless to a few people with life-expectancies under 40. My dictionary?s definition of war doesn?t mention anything about a deadline.

He misses the point (surprising, because it’s one that he’s made himself in the past). While he’s right in arguing with her notion that this isn’t a real war, she isn’t demanding a schedule–she’s asking for a condition that will determine when the war is over. So am I.

A “war on terrorism,” which Jonah has rightly said is a misnomer, truly does have no end, because there will always be terrorists, just as we can never win a “war on drugs,” because there will always be some people who use drugs, regardless of how much of the Bill of Rights we shred.

As I said a couple of posts down, this war is really very similar to World War II–it just has different tactics (well, and strategies). If we declare war on Iraq, or on Saudi Arabia, or even on the ideologies that drive the current governments of those nations, then the war will be over when those governments that support those ideologies are defeated and overthrown.

There are individual Nazis and communists (and even Communists) still in the world, but there’s a broad consensus that Nazism and Communism have been defeated, and the war with them over, because we defeated their power and their expression, their instantiation, in the form of the Nazi regime of Germany and the Communist regime of the former Soviet Union.

Similarly, when we have defeated Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and Syria, and any other regimes that continue to harbor the toxic ideologies that support, encourage, and succor terrorists, then the war will be over, even if terrorism per se has not been eradicated from the earth (as it probably never will be, in any society with human liberties). But in order to do that, we must clarify who the real enemy is. As long as the simplistic answer is “terrorist,” then it will truly be a war without end, and a continuing danger to our civil liberties at home.