President Bush managed yesterday to extricate himself from the gaffe he made when he told the “Today” show on Monday that the war on terror couldn’t be won. He had told “Today” that he wasn’t sure if his grandchildren would be reading about Al Qaeda in the newspaper. “I don’t have any … definite end,” he said. He said of the war on terror, “I don’t think you can win it.” Yesterday he went on Rush Limbaugh’s radio broadcast to say that he probably should have been more articulate and to assert of the war, “We will win it.”

We’d like to think this is all semantics, but there are some underlying issues that bear reflection. “In a conventional war there would be a peace treaty or there would be a moment where somebody would sit on the side and say we quit,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Limbaugh. “That’s not the kind of war we’re in, and that’s what I was saying.” It’s a fair point, but, as Mr. Bush realized in correcting himself as quickly as he did, not one exactly calculated to inspire the public in the midst of the war.

And it invited an attack by the Democrats, however improbable. Senator Edwards invoked the Cold War. “What if other presidents had said it’d be difficult to win the war – the Cold War?” No one doubts that the Cold War was won, but communism still lingers in Cuba and a few coffeehouses in Chelsea. No doubt the reason Mr. Edwards was the one to point that out is that it would have been laughable coming from Senator Kerry, who took the defeatist line when he returned to America during one of the Cold War’s key battles, Vietnam.

Mr. Bush may have corrected himself, but his own staff appears to be divided as to whether the war on terrorism is winnable. Mr. Bush’s key aide on Middle East intelligence, Paul Pillar, published a 2001 book – not an offhand television comment, but a book – in which the concluding chapter argued, “If there is a ‘war’ against terrorism, it is a war that cannot be won.” The book said, “Counterterrorism is a fight and a struggle, but it is not a campaign with a beginning and an end.”

This may be debated abstractly in policy circles, but, as a political matter, asking the public to sign up for a war that cannot be won and has no end isn’t exactly a slam dunk. So we would like to think that some good will come out of this clarifying moment. Our own hope is that the pressure of the campaign and the coming debates will keep the pressure on Mr. Bush to clarify these issues in his own mind and his own staff in a way that overrules the defeatist camp.

For the idea that this is an endless struggle is a recipe for defeat. Like communism in the Cold War, Islamic terrorism is still, at bottom, tolerated and even pursued by enemy governments. They need to be either defeated in combat or exposed to the forces of democracy. Our sense is that at his core, Mr. Bush understands this. Yesterday’s comments were a step in the right direction.