Hmmm. Buried, as you can imagine, but looked at the Harris article. I tend to think he's right in one area - it's different than a traditional war - and wrong in another - that our responses need to be different.

I owe this a better explanation; will work on it, as well as the Rawls thing, and some comments on your homelessness piece.

A.L.

Hi.

No offense, but I think that to describe the war as a "metaphor" is pretentious nonsense. Lee Harris is wrong here, and very silly. And I can't take seriously anybody who really thinks this article is good stuff. It's full of nonsense.

"Clearly, those who called 9/11 by this label intended it as a way of indicating their justifiable horror and outrage at the act; but in choosing this particular label to apply to the event, they were, without noticing it ..."

There is another possibility that Lee Harris doesn't consider: that those who used and continue to use the word "war" regarding this war know what they are saying.

I would recommend to anyone to read Archer Jones' The Art of War in the Western World. Archer Jones knows what "traditional war" is, and persistent raiding, which is what the terrorists are doing, is war.

I gotta agree with David. I read Harris' post and thought about it awhile. It seems like hair-splitting to me.

[This was my comment to Harris, slightly edited...]

What 9/11 made clear was that, without having realized it before, we /were/ already engaged in a war. The fact that our enemy, Al-Qaeda (or more generally militant Islam, as Mark Halperin suggested), is not a nation-state is true, but beside the point. It means they have no recourse to the normal tools of diplomacy in dealing with us and that we have no formal obligation to treat them with more respect than we would treat criminals. Instead, they make demands at a distance and communicate with us through the media. But even if we had not declared war on them, they had quite explicitly declared war on us (many years before 9/11) and their demands were quite clear as well. One of the more sobering aspects of this war is that both their demands and our resistance to them are (at this point) unconditional, making the idea of negotiations and formal surrender moot. - we are both just trying to kill one another. But there's no question that our enemy in this war is an organized, unified body with a central leadership with whom negotiations could in principle be engaged, however unlikely such negotiations seem now.

My main problem with this article, I guess, is that, while it's important to remind ourselves of the differences between this war and those that have established most of our expectations for how wars are conducted, recognizing it as "war" offers a great deal more clarity about this conflict we've found ourselves in than an alternative I've heard proposed. The most egregious wishful thinking we've been engaged in was to convince ourselves, before 9/11, that Al-Qaeda's acts were just isolated criminal acts of rage, which could be dealt with as a law enforcement issue.