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StrategyPage.com has an interesting take on the current War on Terror.
While it's a convenient fig leaf to cover the real nature of the war, we should understand that the "Global War on Terror" is not what current American military operations are all about. Terror is a tactic. Saying we're making war on "terror" is like saying we're making war against blitzkrieg or dive bombing.
What is going on is a global war on violent anti-globalization forces, mostly non-state and most particularly in the Islamic world. It will be like the Cold War, lasting a long time and with cultural, economic, and diplomatic maneuvers fully as important -- if not more so -- as military ones. It is likely to be characterized by even fewer "conventional" military clashes than the was the case during the Cold War, when we had Korea, Vietnam, the various Arab-Israeli Wars, and so forth. Reactionary groups in the Islamic world want to roll back history. They are not the first to try this, but no one has ever succeeded on a large scale.
In the Cold War we had “containment” and “massive retaliation,” with “flexible response.” The idea was to avoid World War III in the hope, eventually realized, that the other side would collapse due to internal contradictions. It worked, despite the disappointment on the part of some of the more enthusiastic anti-Communists that we weren't taking more aggressive action to “roll back” the Reds. Having said that, we need to have a debate about what our national strategy is going to be in this new Cold War.
So far there's not much of a debate. The Bush administration seems to be focused mostly on go-it-alone improvised responses. Tom Barnett's book, The Pentagon's New Maps, has some ideas, but the best use it can be put to is to use it as the basis for further discussion.
That said, keeping the term “Global War on Terror” and paying some attention to the non-Islamist anti-modernity forces is a useful idea.