I'm going to have to disagree with you Ben. While you are absolutely right that a war on terror or terrorism makes no linguistic sense, a war on terrorists is not much better. All three versions frame terrorism as monolithic and homogenize disparate and distinct terrorists, terror, and terrorism. An incorrect frame can lead to incorrect analysis which can lead to incorrect policy, which can be disastrous. While it is certainly true that many terrorist groups have latched onto Al-Qaeda's rhetoric, there are many more that haven't, and there are many more terrorist groups that are not Islamic in nature at all. It makes zero sense to lump in eco-terrorists, anarchists, and left-wing terrorists along with Islamic terrorism. Is the Revolutionary Struggle, a Marxist group in Greece that lobbed an anti-tank missile at our U.S. Embassy in Athens this past January, part of the "War on Terrorists?" Should we be employing the same policy against them that we do against Islamic extremists? What about Chechen "terrorists" in Russia fighting for independence? Who is a terrorist anyway? Are Tibetans terrorists if they're fighting for independence from China? All such language that throws a plethora of unrelated groups together in a giant mixing bowl is neither productive nor logical and should be retired immediately. If the "War on Terror" had been properly framed as the War on Al-Qaida from the beginning, than perhaps we never would have gotten into this catastrophe in Iraq that has reverberated in strengthening/creating Al-Qaida in North Africa, Western Europe, Iraq, and Pakistan/Afghanistan.