For the first time in a long time, from the president about the war, and the enemy:

Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence — the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago. In fact, we’re not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We’re facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers — and no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.

Well, that’s not quite true. Maybe if we all converted and instituted Sharia, they might stop trying to murder us. At least not as quickly. Under those circumstances, of course, they could do it at their leisure, and whim.

Now if only the administration would stop calling it a War on “Terrorism,” and give it its true name.

[Update on a rainy south Florida afternoon]

A bleg: what did people, including the press, call World War II during World War II? Did they call it that? Or just “the war”? Or something else? I always thought that the terms World War I (the Great War) and World War II were terms that arose after the war, in the context of both of them. After all, it would have made no sense to call WW I WW I before WW II, because that would imply knowledge that there would be more to come (not necessarily a tough prediction, given world history, but still). And anyway, WW I was the “war to end all wars.” Woodrow Wilson said so himself…

But now, in the context of past century, why can’t we just call this one World War IV (and the third one straight against a form of totalitarianism)?