An interesting article I found at CNN:

Is America on the path to ‘permanent war’?

The fight against terrorism will fail if we continue to frame it as a “war”. I’m not against war; I am against the futile waste of people and resources on an unwinnable situation. We honor our service men and women by NOT throwing away their lives in a “war” that has no victory condition.

Wiping out terrorism is like fighting fire ants (a Florida pass time) — I kill them in my yard and they pop up at my neighbors. If my neighbor gets rid of them, the ants will move to an abandoned lot, or public land, or inside my frelling car’s engine.

Wage “war” all you want, but the ants aren’t going away, no matter how much poison anyone applies. Biological warfare almost always fails, too — it kills non-target species, or the ants evolve an immunity. In a similar way, the “War Against Terrorism” creates more problems than it solves.

Terrorists are fire ants and africanized bees. They hurt us, sometimes kill us, and often surprise us. They can’t be beaten by a frontal assault with tanks or bombs or drones or armies. We kill a nest here and a hive there, but the threat continues, morphs, and moves.

Are we in this to succeed, or are we just engaged in expensive and ineffective theater?

We need to be smarter.