Jonathan Rauch says it isn't a "war on terror" but, rather, a "war against Jihadism".

"I think defining who the enemy is is a real problem in this war," says Mary Habeck, a military historian at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. "If you can't define who's a real threat and who's just exercising free speech, it's a problem." As it happens, Habeck is the author of one of three new books that, taken together, suggest the time is right to name the battle. It is a war on jihadism.

Jihadism is not a tactic, like terrorism, or a temperament, like radicalism or extremism. It is not a political pathology like Stalinism, a mental pathology like paranoia, or a social pathology like poverty. Rather, it is a religious ideology, and the religion it is associated with is Islam.

But it is by no means synonymous with Islam, which is much larger and contains many competing elements. Islam can be, and usually is, moderate; Jihadism, with a capital J, is inherently radical. If the Western and secular world's nearer-term war aim is to stymie the jihadists, its long-term aim must be to discredit Jihadism in the Muslim world.

Read the whole thing (as Glenn Reynolds likes to say, via Instapundit). I have also been critical of how we characterized this war, almost since the beginning. After 9/11 I advocated a Congressional Declaration of War against Al Qaeda and Afghanistan. This would have given a legal framework for the war, and a name. The Afghanistan War would have ended quickly, which would then have been followed by U.S. participation in a U.N. sponsored peacekeeping and re-building effort in Afghanistan (much like we are doing now). We could have legally separated those prisoners who are Afghan nationals and released them to the new government after the war was over, and kept those we considered to be Al Qaeda fighters (essentially, all the non-Afghans) as POWs to be held until the war against Al Qaeda is over. While this wouldn't have altered the facts on the ground in Afghanistan today, as the enemy would still have been trying to destabilize the government, it would have allowed the President to have the backing of Congress to a much greater degree and saved us some of the public relations problems we are having concerning the prisoners at Guantanamo.

Amir Taheri has more on Iran and the nuclear question.

The Middle East is passing through the most decisive moment in is history since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. The options are clear. One is to let the Khomeinist regime dominate the region and use it as the nucleus of an Islamic superpower which would then seek global domination. The other is to go for regime change in Tehran as a strategic goal. (A third option - creating an Irano-American co-dominium in the region - might not be acceptable to the Arabs and Turkey, let alone Israel.)

All three options are hard to contemplate, especially for the United States and its European allies - powers that wish to set the global agenda but are reluctant to fight for it. The problem is that by refusing to stand up against the Khomeinist regime now, the Americans and Europeans (and their allies in the Arab world) may later have to fight an even bigger and costlier war against a nuclear-armed foe.

I still believe that future historians will look back on President Bush as a man who tried to fight a series of limited wars to prevent a bigger, deadlier one. I suspect they will conclude that he failed. Of course, whether they write their books about it in English, Arabic or on stone tablets is an open question.