What are the terms of this "war"? How will we know when it is over? How is victory defined?
real-world examples and facts might get in the way of your whining
It is not I who am whining for safety and protection no matter what the cost to the principles upon which our nation was founded. Read the article again.
Conveniently, you didn't address any of my points about WWII.
Several things - no, those things are no longer in place but they have been supplanted by less obvious "incremental" incursions on personal liberties. Furthermore, nothing in the article or any speeches I have heard indicate that the legislation being passed right now is of a "temporary" nature. Still, let's assume that it is all "temporary" - have you heard any specification of the duration? Have the terms and conditions of our new "war" been defined? Everything I have seen and heard suggests "open-ended, indefinite, and unlimited." I would be much encouraged by some documentable information to the contrary (aside from your "feelings," that is).
What are the terms of this "war"? How will we know when it is over? How is victory defined?
Very astute questions. We accept all manner of government control and dictatorial interference in nearly everything in time of war, because we are afraid (in theory) of losing the war and suffering worse consequences, and because these measures are understood to be temporary, and that normal civil liberties will return when the war ends and peace returns.
But a "war on terrorism" is not a real war: there is no enemy state to defeat, no armies to rout or navies to sink. There is no way of knowing when we have "won" or when we have "lost", and, like the "war on poverty" or "war on drugs", there are heavy incentives for the State to perpetuate the war indefinitely, since "winning" the war would eliminate the "emergency", return us to a state of civil liberty, and greatly curtail the empire-building of career bureaucrats and the power of those who control the State.
Ergo, alarm bells should be going off in our heads when we hear people say "this was an act of war, not terrorism" and that, therefore, we should have a formal declaration of war "against terrorism". A formal declaration of war would allow, under color of law, the complete repudiation of what remains of our Constitutional liberties. It is a very bad idea.
How the writers of the Constitution must be rolling over in their graves, when it comes to what we have done to the Constitutional power to declare war. We have gone for over 50 years without formally declaring war, instead engaging in nearly constant warfare under cover of "police actions" of various sorts, sometimes with a figleaf from the UN, sometimes without. Now that the "war" has come home to us, we want to blow the dust off of the Constitution, revive the concept of a formal declaration of war, but not, as the Founders intended, against an enemy state, but against a concept ("terrorism") and against an amorphous band of stateless individual enemies.
Since you can't formally defeat a concept and force it to sign a peace treaty, the logical outcome of such a war is a state of permanent war, with all that that implies. Harry Elmer Barnes, the historian, was right when he labeled the post-WWII liberal elite's foreign policy as one of "perpetual war for perpetual peace". We might be headed towards something like George Orwell's "1984", where war is a perpetual state of affairs justifying anything, and is taken as normality. Within twenty years of such "perpetual war normality", no one will remember that a peaceful, Constitutional America ever existed, or what it was like. In fact, few now living remember it.