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The most striking thing about President Obama’s speech on counter-terrorism yesterday was his eagerness to end the “global war on terror” and redefine it as a series of smaller-scale skirmishes. And the most striking thing about the reaction of Republicans was their stated refusal to end it, their longing to keep it going as the pinnacle of national priorities.

“We must define our effort,” the president said, “not as a boundless global war on terror, but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.” The endless war has cost the country 7,000 lives and $1 trillion; must it really be kept running at a sprint when Al Qaeda is a shell of itself and has not carried out a successful American attack in a dozen years?

That sprint, however, has been of enormous political use to Republicans. It has sustained politicians such as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and John McCain. Stoking fear of a foreign enemy is a comfortable position for the party, allowing it to revert to a cold-war posture where any tragedy — like Boston or Benghazi — becomes symbolic of a failure of will, and any retreat can be exploited as a sign of weakness.



That was exactly the reflexive reaction of many Republicans after the speech.

“The Obama administration’s return to a pre-9/11 counterterrorism mindset puts American lives at risk,” said Michael McCaul of Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. “This war will continue whether the president acknowledges it or not.”

Mr. McCain said the struggle with Al Qaeda is nowhere near an end, and to argue that it is on the run “comes from a degree of unreality that, to me, is really incredible.” The enemy, warned Senator Lindsey Graham, is morphing and spreading.

And then the inevitable comment from Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia: “The President’s speech today will be viewed by terrorists as a victory.”

Anti-terrorism is a definitional position for a party that spent decades using Communism as a foil and seemed lost after the Soviet Union fell. In the years of unity after 2001, Democrats generally went along with the Bush-Cheney notion that no price was too high to defeat Islamic terror — whether in dollars, lives, or civil liberties — but yesterday marked a very significant turning point in that relationship.

President Obama acknowledged in his speech that the terrorist network that attacked us in 2001 poses less of a threat than it once did, and proposed a new national attitude to deal with the much-changed threats that now exist. The years to come will be defined by a desperate Republican struggle to keep the old attitude alive.