US equates war on terror with major world conflicts

The analysis delivered by national security adviser Stephen Hadley and Frances Fragos Townsend, the top presidential homeland security aide, followed a series of new bombing attempts in London, which produced no victims but set the British capital further on edge.

The incidents echoed the attack on three subway stations and a London bus two weeks ago that claimed at least 56 lives.

Writing in The New York Times, Hadley and Townsend said the London attacks had made it clear that radical Islamists were "determined to destroy our way of life and substitute for it a fanatical vision of dictatorial and theocratic rule."

They said this vision was reminiscent of Nazi and Communist totalitarian systems, in which a radical few subjugated the helpless many.

"At its root, the struggle is an ideological contest, a war of ideas that engages all of us, public servant and private citizen, regardless of nationality," the Bush advisers went on to say.

Distancing themselves from previous statements about winning the war on terror, the officials acknowledged that the "ideological contest" at hand "can be a long and difficult one" because, as they put it, "even bankrupt ideas have attracted followers for a time."

They insisted a successful war on terror will require force of arms as well as strong allies in the Muslim world.