Nuance, schmuance. That seems to be the vein in which President Bush has responded to suggestions by underlings (well, the nation's top uniformed military officer and his national security adviser) that the conflict in which Americans are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan amounts to anything other than a plain old-fashioned war.

As Bush's oft-heard formulation has it, the United States is engaged in a "global war on terror." That war was triggered by monstrous attacks on our homeland. It must be prosecuted by chasing down those who sponsored the attacks and other outrages such as the lethal bombings in Madrid and London.

The chase properly turned first to Afghanistan, whose Taliban regime gave shelter to al-Qaeda leaders behind the 9/11 plot. Then it was time to go after Saddam Hussein, on the theory that his WMD efforts could easily be put to al-Qaeda's advantage. Oops -- no WMDs? A dangerous and destructive fellow anyway, in a region where the United States had an overriding interest in keeping the lid on. He had to go.

Two-plus years after Iraq was invaded, our effort there remains very much the hard slog that many warned it would be (at least, those who stopped to think what might happen once Saddam and his vicious cadre got the boot). Deaths among American service personnel have topped 1,800, and thousands more have been maimed. There is progress as Iraq tries to establish its own democratic government, but the terror virus remains at large and highly contagious.

No wonder, then, that Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggests a broader concept of what this conflict is all about. Myers told a Washington audience a few days ago that he disliked the standard terminology "because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution."

Part of the solution? Of course. The whole solution? Impossible. That was Myers' well-aimed point in proposing that the war on terror be reframed as a "global struggle against violent extremism."

In a struggle of that sort, he said, "The long-term problem is as much diplomatic, as much economic, in fact more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military. And that's where the focus has to be in the future." White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley conveyed a similar outlook in an interview with The New York Times.

It looks to be a proposition hard to argue with. There are, after all, approximately several jillion young, disaffected Islamic men remaining in the world's hotbeds of jihad, with more coming on line every week to replace the few dozen we perhaps manage to kill after they've slipped into Iraq or Afghanistan to do battle against the infidel invaders.

By now it surely must be plain that this is not and never will be a war against a distinct enemy, subject to defeat in the manner that Imperial Japan, say, was defeated. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship, or aircraft carrier, with or without a "Mission Accomplished" banner.

For all that, when our president returned to the subject in a speech last week, he was reported to have conjured up the "war on terror" at least five times. His one semantic nod to the Myers-Hadley view came when he acknowledged that it's people using terror as a tool who actually are the enemy.

If it's as a wartime commander that Bush wants to be judged, some would say he's in the process of flunking the test. Not all of them are drawn from the bring-'em-home-pronto contingent.

Democratic U.S. Rep. David Price of Chapel Hill articulates some of the most thoughtful criticism of the administration's policies on a variety of fronts. Such was the case when he took the House floor recently to paint a generally gloomy picture of the results being attained in Iraq. However, Price went beyond cataloging the setbacks, disappointments and bloodshed to propose what he called a course correction intended to salvage the effort.

Central to success, Price argued, is to recognize and fix policies that aren't working. It sounds obvious, but he scored the White House for its reluctance to face up to mistakes. He also called for more aggressive outreach to potential partners in reconstruction and the training of Iraqi security forces. And he said reconstruction efforts should focus more intensively on improving the lives of ordinary Iraqi citizens whose deprivation fuels their resentment.

Price seems on the same page as Myers in putting the Iraq conflict in the context of a larger struggle against violent Muslim extremism wherever it occurs. Unless we want to take the awful risk that all our casualties in the shooting war will have been for naught, we had better be smart and resolute in how we wage both the war and the struggle.

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