the "war" on terror

While I'm on a kick of quoting eloquent statements, I came across this one by way of Schneier on Security:

London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers'. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'.

The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement.

-- Sir Ken Macdonald, British Director of Public Prosecutions

To forget that, especially in the context of domestic activities, is to imperil our liberties, to risk undue expansion of the War Power, to risk using the wrong set of tools to solve the problem or to focus on the wrong problem, and, ultimately, to succumb to the very terror we feel we are battling.