The thing that I don't get about all this is how (easily?) distracted everyone seems to have gotten by this claim about "new war" and how the two primary wars being fought by US troops are anything but new. With the passing of the 5th year after 9/11, I'm reminded that we're coming up on the end of the 5th year of the war in Afghanistan. This is largely a conventional (in that any war after Viet Nam can be considered "conventional") conflict against a conventionally armed fighting force being fought by almost completely conventional forces (US and otherwise). Early next year we'll be coming up on the end of the 4th year of the war in Iraq, which certainly began as a conventionally structured war (i.e., "us-against-them") and is now slogging away as a conventional counter-insurgency; it's true that it is co-resident with sectarian violence that either is or will lead to a "civil-type-war" but the US isn't actually involved in that one, except to the extent that it is rooting for one side over the other.
The vast majority of armed conflict the US is involved in today has absolutely nothing to do with "terrorism" -- so all this talk about Gitmo and the Bill of Rights and wiretapping has to be cleanly separated from talk about "bring home the troops" and "Mission Accomplished" ... yes, there's something going on "against Al Qaeda" -- but it's not a war in any sense of the word, new or otherwise. It's much more closely analogous to the (non-military) interaction between East and West as played out by CIA and KGB during the Cold War. None of that required the changing of the "rules of war" -- because it wasn't a war at all.
So the question is: why is the Bush administration pushing so hard on this stuff?
As an aside, I'm in London today and I walked by the US Embassy in what used to be one of the nicer parts of town -- Grosvenor Square -- and the place is a fucking mess with anti-car-bomb-barriers blocking several streets and lots of temporary fencing strewn about. Bleah.
/jordan