Joanthan Rauch compares the war against terorrism to the Cold War, and knocks down certain historical myths about the latter:

Communism and the Soviets were, of course, very different from jihadism or Saddam or Kim. Yet the casting of the Cold War as a chess game between two titans is all hindsight. "Right now, we look back at Communism as centralized and so easy to contain," said Leebaert in an interview, "but that's not how it looked at the time." Communism could mean Moscow or Beijing, Cuba or Vietnam, North Korea or Nicaragua. It could mean armored divisions or shoeless guerrillas or palace coups. It had a hundred guises and a hundred redoubts. And the United States intended to fight them all, everywhere? Surely this was madness.
Today's Americans congratulate themselves on the patient determination that finally brought down the Soviet Union; but, again, that was not how it looked at the time. "So much of the Cold War activity was just winging it, just stumbling along, not getting serious," Leebaert says. U.S. policy fluctuated between poles of confrontation and accommodation. Consistency? You must be joking. Critics said, often rightly, that America was applying double standards left and right.
And for what? Cozying up to murderous African or Latin dictators was no way to win converts to American values; it would mainly create new Communists. Militarily, the Cold War wasn't winnable, as even hawks conceded. If the battle was ever to be won, the decisive front would be economic, and there America's military spending was more hindrance than help. The Cold War was thus the problem, not the solution.
All plausible -- and yet. We know how the story ended.
...Like Truman, Bush has set the country on a potentially long course of wearying and far-flung conflict, not because he wants to, but because "the alternative is much more serious." Is he biting off more than the country can chew? Probably, but so did Truman.