What is fascism? George Orwell asked in an essay 62 years ago because he found the word flung at recklessly different kinds of groups and people, with a degrading effect on the word and confusion generally. He couldn’t answer it then and would have greater difficulty today.

Fascism as an epithet has returned with the Bush administration, where it is connected with “Islamic” and, in turn, hung round the necks of straw “appeasers” because it connotes an unacceptable capitulation to the violent force that struck this nation five years ago. That force, however diminished through military attack, intelligence and law-enforcement work and cooperation among nations, appears more dangerous now because of the chaos in Iraq, further empowering nations such as Syria and Iran, which is now thumbing its nose at the world over the question of nuclear weapons. Those spoiling for a larger fight have reason to push this language forward.

Five years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Flight 93, the number of Americans killed in Iraq nearly equals the number killed that horrible day. Who would have guessed the pressing question five years later would become how many more years, more lives and more billions of dollars would be spent in a country the president now says had nothing to do with 9-11 while al-Qaida continues to operate and the Taliban regroup at the Afghan border? Who would have guessed that the broad domestic and international support for stopping the terrorist threat then would find today a policy carried forward on name-calling?

Nevertheless, President Bush last month said the arrest of terrorists by British agents was proof “that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists.” More recently, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke not only of the need “to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism” but drew parallels between critics of the war and Nazi appeasers while Sen. Rick Santorum and other Republicans, says Newsweek, favors “Islamofascism” to stand for “terrorism.”

Writing in 1944, Mr. Orwell reported that the following groups had been accused of fascist sympathies or tendencies: Conservatives, Socialists, Communists, Trotskyists, Catholics, war resisters, war supporters and nationalists. “It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless,” he concluded. Later, he attempted to define it anyway and decided it meant “roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class.”

If this means little in the context of the debate over who the United States is fighting and who is supportive or not supportive of the administration’s policies in that fight, it is evidence of a how the word is being further strained until it means only something not desirable, which Mr. Orwell eventually settled on in another essay. The fact that we have gone from a set of faces – the 9-11 hijackers – to the blur of Shiite-Sunni clashes in Iraq to the abstract and badly adapted description of a political ideology connected to a religious belief suggests fatigue and confusion in the White House.

As new arrests worldwide and further intelligence work in this nation demonstrate, this is not a time for either. Americans don’t need to be scared, or threatened or smeared for questioning the administration’s policies. They need well-sourced assessments of where

the nation has progressed and how it should consider threats that confront it. They need to know the administration intends to respect the rule of law and to admit its errors so that it can properly mark it successes. They need a sense that in gaining safety, they are gaining in the freedoms President Bush so often describes for others.

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The public would honor the dead on this anniversary by attempting to understand the complex range of forces that make up terrorism and urge that the nation’s resources – its intelligence and military, but also its economic and cultural – be used to eliminate it. This goes beyond remembering the firefighters, stock traders, waiters, secretaries, vacationing families who were killed on Sept. 11 to honoring their memories through policies that preserve long-standing freedoms while effectively combating terrorism.

Last December, the 9-11 Commission members issued their final report card, a list of 40 security measures proposed in 2004. Some of the recommendations have been fulfilled, but there are many more that have not. They list, for instance, the need for an inventory of critical infrastructure and an assessment of the risks; better airline passenger screening; a systematic diplomatic effort to share terrorist watch lists; better airplane cargo inspection; improved data sharing within government (between the White House and Congress would help too); international standards for detention and prosecution of captured terrorists, and so forth.

They acknowledge that progress has been made in several areas, and urge the White House and Congress to continue to make the country safer. But what is striking about this list, or others that have come from various reputable think tanks or government agencies, is how little division there is in the public about the reforms.

In seeking greater safety, the nation, largely, has not sought justifications for broader presidential powers, to demonize political opponents or for new cruelties for captured terrorists. It has supported generally the movement toward practical, nonideological steps that will reduce the chances of attack and increase protections in the event of one. Who is a fascist and who is not don’t arise as questions.