You are correct: Terrorism is not an ideology; and we're not convincingly at war with it.

Submitted by Michael S. (United States), Nov 9, 2014 at 09:22

I agree with you, Sara. Neither is it a religion, a "movement", a country, or anything else against which wars have been fought in the past. It is an ill-defined "weapon"; that's it. Declaring a War on Terror is like declaring a "War on Machine Guns"; though the anti-gun lobby seems to have done that.

The War on Terror reminds me much more of the "War on Poverty" and the "War on Drugs". All are non-winnable; and what's more, it's virtually impossible to define who is a "friend" or "foe" in any of these very, very, very expensive "struggles". A case in point:

I've been saying for some time (along with many others) that Turkey and Qatar are, essentially, on the same side of the fence as the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and HAMAS. The Boston bombers and the Chechen guerillas are also on this same side, along with many other groups; and they regularly interchange fighters, equipment and ammunition. Just today, I am greeted with the following:

In a surprise development, two battalions of Chechen veterans of late 1990s war between Russia and Chechnya are now fighting the Russians in Ukraine, under the Ukrainian flag. These are people who fought at the beginning of the second Russian-Chechen war and ended up in European countries as refugees.

Some of these Chechens had been going to Syria to join the jihadists fighting the Syrian regime because that was the only outlet available. But the Ukraine conflict has given them a new outlet, with the advantage that they can strike the Russian army and Russian interests directly.

-- http://www.jamestown.org/programs/edm/single/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=43062&tx_ttnews[backPid]=756&no_cache=1#.VF93FMk56xM

I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was, because just yesterday, I concluded that European countries such as Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, Ukraine, Moldova, etc., which are (like Turkey) not convincingly committed to the struggle against ISIS and which have shown considerable antagonism to Israel, are aligned with Turkey and Qatar (and hence with the Jihadis). I had wondered at including Ukraine in that list, seeing how much diplomatic and economic effort we have poured into defending them from the Russians; but there you have it -- they're in the trenches with the Chechen Jihadis, the brothers and cousins of the Boston Bombers.

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