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.
Thank you for the compliment, and for your excellent articulation of exactly why the alarm bells ARE going off - loud and clear - for some of us.