Start calling it by another name.

Top Bush officials have changed the way that they talk about terrorism since those bombings in England made it clear that all the talk about "fighting a war in Iraq so we wouldn’t have to fight one at home" was just more propaganda and lies to justify a deadly and costly invasion.

The Bushites have stopped referring to a war on terrorism, apparently deciding it was too easy to talk of winning and losing. Compliments of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, they now call it a "struggle against global extremism."

But do the changes in wording really make a difference? Are they reflective of a different approach?

Unfortunately, yes and no.

When the war on terrorism was launched after the 9/11 attacks, the United States was on the moral high road — and there are few occasions when that can be the case, World War II being the clearest example.

That high road, however, quickly descended into a trail muddied by human-rights and war-ethics violations as we became obsessed not with the terrorists but with overthrowing governments and installing new ones.

And the biggest terrorist of all, Osama bin Laden, escaped and remains at large today.

With the fighting still going on in Afghanistan, the Bushites set their sights on Iraq, even though its connection to 9/11 and terrorism was negligible. Weapons of mass destruction was the rallying lie and fabricated was the evidence.

By the time victory was declared on May 1, 2003, without any sighting of those WMDs, the justified war on terrorism to fight al Qaida was being used to explain the annexing of Iraq. So much for the righteousness of making the world a safer place.

Six months later, even Rumsfeld was questioning the status of the war on terrorism.

"Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" he asked in October 2003.

The world today is not safer. As the U.S. death toll in Iraq passed 1,800, it is all the clearer that the war was not won, that our invasion led to an increase in terrorist recruiting, that Iraq likely is heading toward civil war and that terrorists can still strike when and where they want to.

Rumsfeld today could easily echo this statement from May 2004: "Yet, despite our successes, we are closer to the beginning of this struggle with global insurgency than to its end."

I guess the logic is that since we really haven’t started to make much progress in the war on terrorism, primarily because of the ill-advised commitment of resources to the war in Iraq, it’s not too late to call it something else. Something that doesn’t stress wars, which are won or lost, and terror, which hasn’t been curtailed in the least.

Bush this week, however, appeared to be bucking his staff’s new terminology. We’ll see who wins out.

Beyond the importance of getting rid of the words "war and terrorism," there may be some innate significance in the new words, "struggle," "global," and "extremism."

War is an overt fight, whereas in a struggle, progress is difficult. Obviously, with the president erroneously declaring victory in the Iraq war, the feeling of the Bushites was that they better make it clear that with the "war on terrorism," there will be no victory any time soon.

The struggle is global because the Bush boys wanted to remove any idea that the war would be limited by national boundaries in any way. And that includes the United States.

With the mounting assault on civil rights through the looming extension of the Patriot Act and the skyrocketing number of wiretaps since 9/11, there’s no question our own soil is a battleground in this new struggle.

The number of secret court-authorized wiretaps across the country surged by 19 percent last year. By the end of the year, that surveillance had generated 4,506 arrests and 634 convictions based on wiretap evidence. The numbers do not include court orders for terror-related investigations under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which reached a record 1,754 warrants last year, according to the Justice Department.

Curious yet? Well, why was terrorism changed to extremism? Obviously, because it’s more general and can be invoked to describe just about any person or group that opposes the actions of the Bush government.

The United States needs to get out of the quagmire it has created by confusing Iraq with the war on terror, infusing the terrorists with more power than they’ve ever had. Let’s get out of Iraq and really fight terrorism — before it strikes again.

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Cary Brunswick is managing editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at (607) 432-1000, ext. 217, or cary@thedailystar.com.