I don’t know if you guys and gals saw it, but in the issue of the NY Times that came out the morning of President Bush’s primetime speech this week, there was an op-ed article by John Kerry titled, The Speech the President Should Give.

Near the top of the piece, Kerry writes, “The reality is that the Bush administration’s choices have made Iraq into what it wasn’t before the war - a breeding ground for jihadists.”

I want to talk about that word: jihadists.

The President called them terrorists in his speech. He also called them insurgents. Sometimes he used them interchangably, as in “Iraqi forces have led a major anti-terrorist campaign in Baghdad called Operation Lightning, which has led to the capture of hundreds of suspected insurgents.” Other times, they are two different things. “To complete the mission,” he said, “we will continue to hunt down the terrorists and insurgents.”

Since the President doesn’t seem to know, let’s look at the the difference between these two words, and then let’s look at Senator Kerry’s term. This is more than just the semantic discussion it would seem. The process of writing (even for speeches) is the process of making choices. You can be sure that Senator Kerry thought long and hard before choosing his jihadists over the President’s terrorists and insurgents. Within that choice lies the difference between opposing views of this war.

On one side of that difference, you have a Global War on Terror. On the other, you have something much more difficult to comprehend, but something that is much closer to reality.

Terrorists, as we all should know, are those who use violence and intimidation to achieve political objectives. Since that seems to describe anyone who would make war, we normally restrict its usage to those groups and individuals who primarily strike at civilians and and nongovernmental organizations. Of course, any war-raging nation will destroy private factories where weaponry is being made, so we try to restrict the definition further by including the phrase noncombatant targets. We also have to stress the use of the term primarily that we included above, because any military action contains a strong change of inflicting collateral damage.

But if we stick with just this as a definition, then the individuals who flew the plane into the Pentagon couldn’t be considered terrorists: the target was a military target and most of those killed were government employees. But since these people were obviously terrorists, we restrict our definition even more by saying that terrorists disguise themselves as civilian noncombatants.

There. Now we know what terrorists are. But what’s an insurgent?

An insurgent is someone who takes part in an armed rebellion against a constituted authority. It differs from rebel in that rebels may fight for unjust reasons, such as the ability to grow illegal drugs and enslave a group of villages; insurgents, however, rebel in the hope of improving current conditions. Because an insurgent fights a constituted authority, his (or her) tactics are usually covert. Some might suggest the tactics differ from terrorism hardly at all, but it seems to me that the only necessary similarity is the disguise. It makes no tactical sense to attack a constituted force under its own terms: it would be suicide on a massive scale, especially when the constituted authority is allied with strongest military force the Earth has ever seen.

How does this explain the apparent willingness of our enemy in Iraq to kill innocent civilians? I would imagine that our enemy doesn’t believe in innocence in this war. I don’t know where they would ever get the idea, but it seems like their motto might be, “You are either with us or against us in the fight against the Great Satan.”

Senator Kerry’s term captures that more so than either of the President’s. A jihadist is one who struggles in the path of Allah. The word comes from the arabic root j-h-d, with the basic meaning of striving or effort. Some classical interpretations view this struggle as personal, a struggle for inner purification, but the modern usage is almost always reserved for an armed struggle.

In the first part of the Koran, when the Prophet is located in Mecca and trying to convert his family and neighbors, the term is usually meant in reference to the personal struggle. But in the later parts, when Muhammad is in Medina and in a war with the rulers of Mecca who had him exiled, jihad is used primarily in its militaristic sense.

By naming the enemy in Iraq as jihadists, Senator Kerry does not equivocate on the Islamic nature of their intentions. According to Bernard Lewis’ book, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, there are four types of enemies upon whom a Muslim may wage lawful war:

• infidels
• apostates (renouncers of Islam)
• rebels
• bandits

Lewis writes:

Although all four types of wars are legitimate, only the first two count as jihad. Jihad is thus a religious obligation. In discussing the obligation of the holy war, the classical Muslim jurists distinguish between offensive and defensive warfare. In offense, jihad is an obligation of the Muslim community as a whole, and may therefore be discharged by volunteers and professionals. In a defensive war, it becomes an obligation of every able-bodied individual. It is this principle that Usama Bin Laden invoked in his declaration of war against the United States.

Regardless of Bin Laden’s physical influence in Iraq (even abstracted into money), he is obviously a psychological and motivational force. But even if he was not, the Koran gives all the religious authorization necessary to compel the jihadists to fight until their death. Any way you slice it, the army of the United States is an army of infidels and they have invaded (regardless of their secular reasons) the Holy Land. It is the religious duty of able-bodied Muslims to fight us. Furthermore, those who don’t fight who can are therefore to be considered apostates, and it is legitimate to fight them as well. In a defensive war between Muslims and invading infidels, there truly are no innocents.

By naming our enemy as jihadists, Senator Kerry names the real threat to our national security. He does not hide behind the fuzzy identification, terrorists. The President’s term enlightens nothing but shadows, shows us nothing but ghosts without faces, without agendas, without rationales. This could not be further from the truth.

We know who is fighting us. And we know why they are fighting us. Even President Bush makes it clear: “[They] murder in the name of a totalitarian ideology.” But those terms, while accurate, do not bring as close as possible to the truth. The truth is that they murder in the name of religion.

Make no mistake. This is a war between secularism and religiosity. The problem is not figuring out who we are fighting and why. But rather, the problem is figuring how we can win.

Bombs and bullets will not do it. This is something that President Bush (and seemingly, John Kerry) does not understand. We are not fighting a flesh and blood enemy here.

We are fighting an idea. Or better yet, we are fighting a meme.

That’s what makes this semantic discussion so important. Because in a war of ideas, in a war of memes, the most powerful weapons we have are our words. We have to use the right ones.