First a confession: I’m a few steps behind. Here in Cairo, a blissful step removed from the U.S. news cycle (but, I like to think, a few steps closer to the events that shape it), I missed this. Only today’s BBC online story alerted me.

The Pentagon’s new 20-year plan seems sensible enough from the Post’s report. The military has been asked to fight small groups of insurgents and terrorists planning attacks against the United States. The changes the plan suggests seem appropriate to the task.

What astonishes me is this newspeak about “The Long War.” I was living in New York on September 11, 2001. Since then I have supported finding the people who perpetrated the attacks of that day and either shooting them in the head or locking them in some dungeon in Utah for the rest of their lives (the latter option seems crueler). But I’ve been troubled by Bush’s talk of the “War on Terrorism” since he started with it five years ago. You can’t declare victory against an abstraction. And it seems axiomatic that your should never fight a war you can’t finish–particularly if that “war” is used as a justification to suspend or discard the values you’re claiming to defend, or to justify, by some tortured logic, counterproductive moves like invading Iraq.

Keep trying to catch people who want to kill innocent people. Obviously. Foil their plots. That’s what you’re hired to do. But I’m astonished that so many thinking people now seem comfortable enough with the idea of permanent war to edge toward advocating it—and worse, that people are listening. See William Kristol (who, incredibly, is still around; you’d think he’d have been totally discredited by now) and former CIA strategist James Harris.

Technorati Tags: terrorism, qdr, the long war