All these formulations are important, but "war on terror" is the one that has caught on. . . . The phrase meets the basic test of Presidential rhetoric: it has entered the language so fully, and framed the way people think about how the United States is reacting to the September 11th attacks so completely, that the idea that declaring and waging war on terror was not the sole, inevitable, logical consequence of the attacks just isn't in circulation.
—Nicholas Lemann, American journalist, The New Yorker, September 16, 2002