Definitions

Ganked wholesale from Paperwight's Fair Shot:

War

A politically useful rhetorical device used to describe a set of circumstances in which the enemy, depending on who you ask, is either a distributed network of non-state actors or the tactic that they use with mixed success every three to four years, but either way has no discernable victory condition.

Not war

An actual conflict between identifiable and organized factions in which ongoing violence is killing at least fifty and sixty people every day, and which has as its goal control of a government apparatus and / or a particular territory.

Funny, that.