People of Warsaw on September 3, 1939, with banner reading: “Long Live England!”1940’s “Phoney War” bears some resemblance to 2014’s “Phantom War.” True, today there is no Hitler around planning to Blitzkrieg France in six months. But the Mideast is not lacking in “mini-me” Hitlers. Some argue that the threat posed by ISIS/ISIL is being overblown. Maybe that “Islamic State”—with 31,000 soldiers and billions in oil revenues—remains a pipsqueak. Not so the Mideast’s other “Islamic States”: Shia Iran but also Sunni Turkey, perverted into a Muslim fascist autocracy by Erdogan who refuses to call ISIS/ISIL “terrorist” much less fight against it, while libeling Israel as “a terrorist state.” (The Palestinians—who habitually call Israelis Nazis—have just equated ISIS/ISIL beheaders with the Jewish state.) Of course our dithering Secretary of State—whose mislocutions make Dwight Eisenhower’s seem like logical precision—can’t decide whether we are or are not at “war” or whether or not we are talking about joining up to the Iranians, whom the Ayatollah Khameini says want nothing to do with talk with us. Kerry’s model for statecraft is not Machiavelli’s “The Prince” but the Mad Queen in “Alice in Wonderland.” On the home front, Attorney General Holder has announced a step up in the preventative war against “homegrown terror.” But this too is just another hold(er)ing action. He refuses to mouth the words that dare not speak their name—“Islamic terrorism”—for fear of offending the elephant (or camel) in our living room. Generations ago, William James challenged the U.S. to enlist in “the moral equivalent of war.” Today, we need the martial alternative to political spinelessness and prevarication.