As ever, Mark Steyn hits the nail on the head:

On the afternoon of Sept. 11, as the Pentagon still burned, Donald Rumsfeld told the president, 'This is not a criminal action. This is war.'

That's still the distinction that matters. By contrast, after the 2005 London bombings, Boris Johnson, the Conservative member of Parliament, wrote a piece headlined 'Just Don't Call It War.' Johnson objected to the language of 'war, whether military or cultural . . . Last week's bombs were placed not by martyrs nor by soldiers, but by criminals.'

Sorry, but that's the way to lose. A narrowly focused 'criminal' approach means entrusting the whole business to the state bureaucracy. The obvious problem with that is that it's mostly reactive: blow somewhere up, we'll seal it off, and detectives will investigate it as a crime scene, and we'll arrest someone, and give him legal representation, and five years later when the bombing's faded into memory we'll bring him to trial, and maybe conviction, and appeal of the conviction, and all the rest. A 'criminal' approach gives terrorists all the rights of criminals, including the 'Gee, Officer Krupke' defense: I'm depraved on account of I'm deprived. If you fight this thing as a law enforcement matter, Islamist welfare queens around the world will figure there's no downside to jihad: After all, you're living on public welfare in London plotting the downfall of the infidel. If it all goes horribly wrong, you'll be living on public welfare in Virginia, grandstanding through U.S. courtrooms for half a decade. What's to lose?

It's a very worn cliche to say that America is over-lawyered, but the extent of that truism only becomes clear when you realize how overwhelming is our culture's reflex to cover war as just another potential miscarriage-of-justice story. I was interested to see that the first instinct of the news shows to the verdict was to book some relative of the 9/11 families and ask whether they were satisfied with the result. That's not what happened that Tuesday morning. The thousands who were killed were not targeted as individuals. They died because they were American, not because somebody in a cave far away decided to kill Mrs. Smith. Their families have a unique claim to our sympathy and a grief we can never truly share, but they're not plaintiffs and war isn't a suit. It's not about 'closure' for the victims; it's about victory for the nation. Try to imagine the bereaved in the London blitz demanding that the Germans responsible be brought before a British court.

Ah, but if we were fighting World War Two now, we'd lose. The problem is that what's happening corresponds neither to criminality nor to war, as conventionally defined, but lies stranded in an existential limbo somewhere between the two. We define war as between states, which clearly the global jihad is not. On the other hand, the stakes for which the jihad is playing -- the conquest of the free world and its subjugation to Islamism -- mean that it is not only absurd to regard it as criminality but positively dangerous, because the response is so demonstrably inadequate. The premise of the criminal justice system is that it is better if a number of guilty people go fre than that one innocent person should be wrongly jailed. When it comes to the jihad, however, this is a risk no society can take. Hence the problem.

Posted by melanie at May 8, 2006