It's always interesting to try to parse the difference between whom the Right and the Left think America is actually at war with.

In that vein today at TAPPED, Ezra Klein -- one of the more reasonable folks over there -- offers what I think is a very unreasonable attack on how the Right sees the War on Terror. Or, as Ezra puts it: "THE WAR ON TERROR/ISLAM/RADICAL ISLAM/BROWN PEOPLE."

Ezra concludes that, "the Islamic world is right. In the minds of those behind this campaign, this is indeed a war against Islam. The enemy is religious, his skin is brown, his God is Allah." Why? Because conservative commentators by-and-large think the term "War on Terror" is a cop-out from naming our real enemy, radical Islam.

Who does Ezra think we're at war with? "Most liberals I know think we're literally at war with al-Qaeda, its operational affiliates, and its imitators," he says. Under this rationale, I suppose, the Afghanistan campaign makes sense; but Iraq only makes sense if we're at war with "Islam" and "brown people."

Where this goes wrong is that we could wipe Al Qaeda, its affiliates, and its imitators off the face of the earth tomorrow, and we'd still be contending with radical Islam as well as state sponsors of terror such as Iran and Syria. The liberals, after all, are the ones (not entirely incorrectly, I might add) saying that we need to deal with "root causes," such as poverty and oppression and hatred of America abroad.

So, no, it's not as if Al Qaeda & Co. are just a "state" we could defeat. There's an ideology and a religious movement ultimately behind those targeting America.

So, the rationale for Iraq? No, it wasn't because we felt like bombing some brown people who worship Allah. It was because of the WMD question. It was to intimidate Iran and Syria (oops...). And it was because a group of conservatives and Democrats -- mostly neocons -- believed (rightly or wrongly) that introducing democracy into the Arab world was the best way to begin a transformation of the region that would leave it more stable and more peaceful.

(Again, oops ... at least in the short term. In the long term, the question is still open.)

So, trying to treat the War on Terror as somehow racist, or as a "crusade" by another name, as Ezra does, is extremely unhelpful. Americans have no lust for a conquest of the Middle East. They'd be perfectly happy with a policy of benign neglect, if not for the planes flying into buildings.

The people who flew those planes were part of Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda is just one symptom of the disease: radical Islam. You don't treat the sympton. You treat the disease.