Matthew Miller: What we're in is not a war

It's time to challenge the premise behind White House efforts to delegitimize questions on everything from pre-9/11 screw-ups to Enron to the budget.

The premise is that we are at "war." The reality is that this is not a war. And if we're not in a war, everything about public discussion can be different. Indeed, the truest war we're in today may be the war to frame the debate, because the way debate gets framed goes far in determining its outcome.

Language matters. George Bush's invocations of war echo Churchill stiffening English spines during the Blitz. But we are not in such a war. In such a war an entire nation mobilizes against daily and massive threats to its survival. Or an entire nation puts comfort and family on hold and revamps its industrial system to support large-scale military action on foreign soil, as we did in World War II.

Bush has issued no such call for sacrifice, because none is required. The main civilian "sacrifice" of the post-9/11 age is an inconvenience -- longer security lines for the fraction of Americans who are regular air travelers. It would be preposterous to suggest we reorganize our entire economy to fight Al-Qaida.

Instead, we face a frightening new era in which terrorism, and the fight against terrorism, can be expected to be a permanent feature of American life. This is not the same as facing the full might of Nazi Germany, with tens of millions of mobilized citizens. It means facing the unconventional tactics and potentially devastating weaponry of a loosely organized network of several thousand people who want to kill us.