In his letter to the editor of March 23 headlined “A deceptive phrase,” Ben Lounsbury criticizes the Bush administration for having created the phrase “The war on terror.”

Lounsbury correctly points out that “terror is a state of mind, not a country … terrorism is a strategy … the phrase ‘The war on terror’ prevents us from thinking clearly.” He then implies that the Bush administration created this phrase “to provide retrospective justification” for the war on Iraq.

I agree with my good friend and colleague Lounsbury that this unfortunate phrase prevents us from thinking clearly about the life-or-death struggle we are fighting against a ruthless and barbaric enemy.

The horrific attack on September 11, 2001, crashing hijacked American airliners into the twin World Trade Center towers in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and, in an aborted attack, into a field in Pennsylvania, slaughtering almost 3,000 innocent civilians in the most barbaric manner, was our second Pearl Harbor and “Day of Infamy” – a declaration of war against the United States of America by radical Islamism.

Honorable people may question the competency of the Bush administration, or disagree with the rationale of going to war in Iraq.

Rightly or wrongly, we are there now. The Islamist terrorists, al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden consider it the central front of their jihad against the West, and we cannot afford to lose this monumental struggle.

And let’s call it what it is: “The war against radical Islamism.”

Klaus D. Kuck, Lewiston

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