War on Whom?

Caleb Carr takes issue with one of the lines of the 9/11 Commission report. The particular phrase that he does not like is:

"the enemy is not just 'terrorism,' some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism -- especially the al Qaeda network, its affiliates, and its ideology."

Carr objects to this phrasing because

the members of the commission have tried to rewrite the terms of the global war on terrorism and turn it into a global war on Islamist terrorism alone.

and that this phrasing will be misinterpreted by the Arab world as a "clash of civilizations". Carr instead believes that we need to fight against terrorism in general. Obviously, this would require a definition of terrorism, which he provides, albeit in the form of a strawman argument:

Certainly terrorism must include the deliberate victimization of civilians for political purposes as a principal feature -- anything else would be a logical absurdity.

that he then knocks down by saying that under this definition

..the United States...would have to admit that its fire-bombings of German and Japanese cities during World War II represented effective terrorism.

While Carr acknowledges that there is a war and that we must fight it, he is wrong both about the definition of terrorism, as well as the actual enemy. Terrorism is more than just the "victimization of civilians for political purposes"; a more correct definition would be "the systematic use of terror or unpredictable violence against governments, publics, or individuals to attain a political objective". The US bombing Japanese or German cities was a war, not terrorism.

More importantly, is the question of whether we should define this as a war against Islamist terrorism. Carr's argument that the Arab world might misinterpret it is meaningless. Why should we care about insulting them? In fact, defining it this way, and making the Arab world understand that we are serious in this war could do a lot to make these Arab governments act against the terrorists to forestall our action against them. Additionally, who exactly is attacking the US, Spain, Israel, the Philippines, India, etc.? Was it Buddhists who flew the planes into the WTC? Is it Zoroastrians who blow up buses in Israel? Or Catholics beheading hostages in the Philippines?

Clearly our current war is against Islamist terrorism. Undoubtedly other terrorism exists, but it is not an existential threat to us or anyone else. This war is against Islamism, and the sooner we can get over the p.c. bullshit and acknowledge it, the quicker we will be able to triumph over it.