WAR AND WORDS.(The Talk of the Town)

A President is well advised to choose his words carefully. This is something the incumbent, left to his own devices, is not always capable of doing. A State of the Union speech finesses that difficulty. The speaker speaks off the teleprompter, not the cuff. And the words that scroll down on the angled reflectors to his left and his right are as carefully--or, at any rate, as exhaustively--considered as bureaucratic thoroughness can make them. Every prepared Presidential address has multiple authors, but a State of the Union is the product of whole buildings full of them. The text that George W. Bush recited last Tuesday night had gone through thirty drafts.

It's safe to assume, therefore, that the President was not speaking casually when he identified America's mortal enemy as "radical Islam." This is the latest milestone in a wandering terminological journey that began shortly after September 11, 2001. "War on terror" has always been problematic, at both ends. The word "war" has the requisite urgency, and it has proved useful in intimidating the political opposition at home. But, as we have seen in Iraq and elsewhere, its associations--pitched battles, clashing states, disciplined armies with general staffs--can invite actions that are, at best, beside the point. "Terror" is not a conquerable enemy, or an end in itself. It is a method of achieving some political goal, however outlandish or unrealizable--an ugly and frightening method, as was the bombing of civilian populations in the Second World War. But "war on terror" is a chimerical circle, like "war to end all wars." Woodrow Wilson's war to end all wars defeated imperial Germany, but it did not, and could not, defeat war. Nor can a war on terror defeat terror.

Now and then over the past couple of years, the Administration has halfheartedly tried to shed the straitjacket of its own slogan. "We actually misnamed the war on terror," Bush mused in the summer of 2004. "It ought to be 'the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.' " A year later, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made a run at substituting the catchier "global struggle against violent extremism." It didn't fly. Bush, who had decided that he wants to be a war President, not a struggle President, shot it down. But "struggle" would at least have acknowledged that warfare is not the sole solution, and "violent extremism" would have recognized a motive behind the method.

Last October, speaking at the National Endowment for Democracy, the President returned to the topic, floating more names for the "focussed ideology" that brought down the Twin Towers. "Some call this evil Islamic radicalism," he said. "Others, militant jihadism; still others, Islamofascism." As of last week, he seemed to have settled on "radical Islam." It's a bad choice, reminiscent of his early talk of a "crusade." Violent jihadism, yes. Islamist (as distinct from Islamic) terrorism, yes. But not Islam, radical or otherwise.

There's no doubt, of course, that terrorists of the Al Qaeda ilk are drawn from the ranks of adherents of "radical"--which is to say, extreme or fundamentalist--Islam. But radical Islam is a far broader and more variegated phenomenon than the terrorist virus that infects it. Its incarnations range from Al Qaeda to the clerical and legal establishments of Saudi Arabia. In virtually every iteration, it demands the subordination of women, the stunting of education, and the curbing of the freedom of speech, of the press, and of religion. It should be opposed, as part of America's thirty-year-old campaign against violations of human rights. But it is not in and of itself a casus belli. Violence and terrorism are not intrinsic to it. And it is emphatically not something against which the United States should seek to fight a war to the death. One of Al Qaeda's goals has been to frame the conflict as a holy war between Muslims and infidels. In calling it a war, Bush emphasized its seriousness, but at the cost of granting its criminal perpetrators the dignity of warriors. Calling it a war against Islam, even radical Islam, grants them the other half of their wish.

In the section of his speech ...