Some set the matter aside as being nothing more than verbal play for the benefit of word-men. What term properly designates what we are doing, and what we are enduring, in many parts of the world, the symbolic center of which is the Twin Towers site in Manhattan? Sometimes the words chosen can mean the justification of an additional measure of military power. Always they calibrate the public mood and the public perception of what is going on.
I am informed that French pacifists, ensconced in the French Academy in 1939 and determined to understate Nazi military exercises (even those being done as close by as Czechoslovakia), refused to acknowledge such a creature as a "bombardier." Right, "bombardier" would have meant "bomber pilot." The pacifists were prepared to use the word bombardier, but only as the flying instrument -- an airplane from which one drops bombs. Since no such creature as a pilot who drops bombs from such an airplane was acknowledged to exist, the schoolmen of the academy at first refused to authorize that use of the word.
Norman Podhoretz, a gifted writer and analyst, does not cavil in these matters, and his new book is called "World War IV." By Podhoretz's calculations, World War II ended with the surrender of Berlin and Tokyo. This was followed by another and very serious war, which we termed the Cold War. That pretty well ended when the Soviet Union allowed the gates in Berlin to open and, two years later, abandoned the Soviet flag. But the end of World War III did not augur an end to global warfare. The new enemy is referred to in certain quarters as Islamofascism. And Podhoretz is the chief taxonomist of that awful combine.
He quotes in his book Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum. Pipes is off to a rollicking and reassuring start in what becomes the deadliest paragraph in town. Begin with our military superiority, which would appear to make victory inevitable. "Islamists have nothing like the military machine the Axis deployed in World War II, nor the Soviet Union during the Cold War. What do the Islamists have to compare with the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? The SS or Spetznaz? The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for that matter, to Auschwitz or the Gulag?"
A thoughtful answer to that question is sobering. The Islamists have:
-- A potential access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate Western life.
-- A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power than the artificial ideologies of fascism or communism.
-- An impressively conceptualized, funded and organized institutional machinery that successfully builds credibility, goodwill and electoral success.