Wars declared on common nouns don’t really have a great track record of success in this country.

We have been warring against drugs for decades now, but we still have plenty of them. The war on poverty has seen the real income of the poor decrease even while the income of the rich has increased. And the war on terror has led us to successively higher years of global terrorist acts, with 2003 representing a 20-year high in significant attacks, according to the State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism report.

Aug. 30, when Matt Lauer of NBC’s “Today” asked President Bush whether the war on terror could be won, Bush responded, “I don’t think you can win it.” He quickly changed his tune (flip-flopped?), going back to the same old “winning the war on terror” rhetoric we all know and love. But for a moment there, we got a glimpse of the truth.

The war on terror is not a fight with a nation, not Afghanistan and certainly not Iraq. It’s not even a fight with an ideology. The spread of communism was a new kind of enemy in modern warfare, but at least it was easily observed. No, this is a fight with a combat tactic, available to almost any group engaged in a struggle that they think warrants its use.

In 2003 alone, terrorism was used all over the world by radical Islamist groups and radical communist groups and every other radical group. Most attacks remain unclaimed by any faction. The United States has been decisive in the face of this threat, but decisiveness is not always a good thing.

Decisions regarding Iraq were made and maintained despite evidence that an attack was unnecessary. Instead of concentrating our efforts on eliminating legitimate terrorist threats, we are engaged in a war that has distracted us from emerging threats. Of the three nations named as an “axis of evil,” we invaded the only one that wasn’t on the verge of becoming a nuclear power.

This decisiveness has not made our world safer. More than 1,000 Americans have died in Iraq, with that number still climbing. Terrorists have been striking with more boldness and ferocity than any time since Sept. 11. The recent siege of an elementary school in Russia left at least 330 dead, making it the most deadly attack of the war on terror.

On Tuesday, Vice President Dick Cheney warned the United States would be at the risk of a terror attack if it made “the wrong choice in November.” But Bush and Cheney’s track record isn’t exactly stellar.

Bush was right. We cannot win the war on terror. But we could lose it. We need resolve, but we also need a flexible and effective plan for dealing with this threat. So far, Bush has not demonstrated one.