RINCETON, N.J. -- There is an old Bill Mauldin cartoon in which two elderly gentlemen are sitting in a gentlemen's club. One leans forward and speaks: "I say it's war, Throckmorton, and I say, let's fight!" There has been a lot of talk like that in Washington since Sept. 11. And around the country, too: we all feel a little bit like Throckmorton's friend. But is it war? And if it is, how should we go about fighting it?

Certainly we have an enemy, all of us, whatever our politics or religion. Our lives and our way of life have been attacked — everyone says this, but it is true nonetheless. The attack may have had its most immediate origins in the Persian Gulf war; it may have been fueled by fervid and highly distorted accounts of the blockade of Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But its causes go much deeper: resentment of American power and hatred of the values that sometimes, at least, guide its exercise. This is not, however, a "war of civilizations," since our enemy does not represent a civilization. We are not at war with Islam, even if terrorists exploit Islamic religious fervor.

So is it a war? The word is unobjectionable so long as those who use it understand what a metaphor is. There is, right now, no enemy state, no obvious battlefield. "War" may serve well, however, as a metaphor to signify struggle, commitment, endurance. Military action, though it may come, is not the first thing we should be thinking about. Instead, in this "war" on terrorism three other things take precedence: intensive police work across national borders, an ideological campaign to engage all the arguments and excuses for terrorism and reject them, and a serious and sustained diplomatic effort.

What the police have to do is obvious, but there is work also for religious leaders and public intellectuals, because the intellectual climate in many parts of the world is insufficiently unfriendly to terrorism. Terrorists are morally as well as physically harbored, and the only remedy for that is political argument. And our diplomats have a lot more to do than they did in building the coalition that fought the gulf war. That was a jerry-built alliance, fit for the moment but not for the long haul. The alliance against terrorism has to be structured to last: it must rest on demanding and enforceable agreements.

But military action is what everybody wants to talk about — not the metaphor of war, but the real thing. So what can we do? There are two conditions that must be met before we can fight justly. We have to find legitimate targets — people actually engaged in organizing, supporting or carrying out terrorist activities. And we must be able to hit those targets without killing large numbers of innocent people.

Despite the criticism of Israeli "assassinations" by United States officials, I don't believe that it matters, from a moral point of view, if the targets are groups of people or single individuals, so long as these two criteria are met. If we fail to meet them, we will be defending our civilization by imitating the terrorists who are attacking it.

It follows from these criteria that commando raids are likely to be better than attacks with missiles and bombs. When the target is, say, a small and scattered group of terrorists-in-training, a soldier with a rifle is smarter than the smartest bomb. But what if the purpose of our attack is to force governments that support terrorist activities to surrender the terrorists or to stop financing them? That is certainly a legitimate aim — indeed a necessary aim of any alliance against terrorism. But our coercive capacities in that sphere are morally limited. We can't coerce governments by terrorizing their civilian populations. In countries as desperately poor as Afghanistan, we can't set about systematically destroying what infrastructure is left. Electricity grids and water purification plants are not legitimate targets.

We can bomb government buildings, which will probably be empty. And maybe if the bombing is spectacular and the pilots heroic, that symbolic action will allow us to get on with what really has to be done. Terrorist states have to be isolated, ostracized and embargoed; their borders closed; their secret organizations penetrated; their ideological justifications everywhere rejected. The greatest danger right now is that having done sufficient damage — somewhere — we will edge away from these tasks and the commitment of resources necessary to defeat terrorism. We should pursue the metaphorical war; hold back on the real thing.