You asked if I were a traitor when I said that this was no war.

I am no traitor, sir, nor a sympathizer with the criminals who committed mass murder on the Eleventh of September, 2001. I am an American whose childhood was shaped by Pearl Harbor and the four years of real War that followed it; whose adolescence was molded by the commitment to the Korean peninsula; and who raised his children while my brother fought in that growing conflict in Vietnam - launched by the naval engagement that never was and ended by a secret plan existing only in a partisan imagination.No, sir, I am no traitor and this, sir, is no War.

Even the nine week excursion into the Iraqi desert more closely resembled a War than this sideshow does. We have used billions of dollars of precision airborne ordinance to bomb a 12th Century people back to the 12th Century. We have reduced rubble to rubble. We have detained 300 or so for questioning and all we have to show for it is the head of Daniel Pearl.

No, sir, this is no War.

While we are asked only to spend our weekends bouncing from mall to mall to engage in a continuing demonstration of our ability to consume more and more, this is no war. When the only sacrifice that Americans are asked to make is to look the other way while the essence of our liberty is being chipped away in the name of Homeland Security, then, sir, this is no war. It is something else.

What is it then? To call it a War is to engage in an Orwellian degradation of the language. I see a flame licking at the Reichstag and hear wail of sing-song sirens in the night. What does it mean to America if in hunting Bin Laden we turn aside from our heritage as a free people?

Ask Patrick Henry! Ask the veterans of Valley Forge. Ask those who lay at Fredericksburg's Stone Wall. Ask the Marines at Belleau Wood. Ask those who died at Anzio and on the Yalu and in the jungles between Hanoi and Saigon and they will tell you sir, this is no war.