In a major foreign-policy speech at the National Defense University Thursday, President Obama warned that trying to fight a perpetual war on terror "will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways." Given our progress in dismantling al Qaeda and its allies, he asked Congress to strip him of many of the wartime powers granted to him as commander in chief by the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001.

"Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate.  And I will not sign laws designed to expand this mandate further.  Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue.  But this war, like all wars, must end.  That’s what history advises.  That’s what our democracy demands."

Given the threats that still confront us, the speech was not a declaration of victory. "Make no mistake, our nation is still threatened by terrorists," Obama said. "From Benghazi to Boston, we have been tragically reminded of that truth.  But we have to recognize that the threat has shifted and evolved from the one that came to our shores on 9/11."

That's undoubtedly true. With bin Laden and most of his lieutenants dead, and with the al Qaeda network thoroughly disrupted, the threat has now shifted to individual, isolated acts of violence, such as the brutal machete attack in London. A permanent war footing, with all that implies for the nation's legal, political and national security systems, is not necessary to address that kind of threat.

But of course, some in Congress disagree, and they disagree rather strongly. To hear U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, for example, we are more threatened today than ever. "The enemy is morphing. It is spreading,” he said Thursday. “There are more theaters of conflict today than there have ever been. Our allies are more afraid than I’ve ever seen; our enemies more emboldened.” That line of argument was echoed by U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

"This war will continue whether the president acknowledges it or not," McCaul said. "The president's policies signal a retreat from the threat of Al-Qaeda, which has decentralized and spread throughout the world."

It's quite a remarkable thing. Here we have an American president, asking to be stripped of powers that he no longer believes he needs. And we have a Congress insisting that he keep that authority.

It's important to note that under the line of thinking advocated by Graham, McCaul, John McCain and others, we would be expanding rather than drawing down our military involvement. We would still have tens of thousands of troops in Iraq, caught in the crossfire while trying to referee a bloody Shia-Sunni dispute. We would not be withdrawing from Afghanistan, we would have put boots on the ground in Libya and perhaps Syria, and we would have already launched extensive military strikes against Iran, with unpredictable consequences. For some people, war is simply a more comfortable place to be, and nothing is going to change that reality. But that doesn't make it smart policy.

However, perhaps the harshest criticism of Obama's speech came from U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, who claimed in a much-cited statement Thursday that it would be "viewed by terrorists as a victory." If  you look at the war in its full context, I think the opposite is true.

From the beginning, part of our enemies' strategy has been to generate so much fear in the American people that we would permanently sacrifice the principles that we claimed to hold so dear. Just a month after the attacks in New York and Washington, the late Osama bin Laden laid it out in explicit terms. While the initial attacks were a great success, he said in an al Jazeera interview, "the events that followed are dangerous and more enormous than the collapse of the towers."

"The values of this Western civilization under the leadership of America have been destroyed. Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights, and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke. ... I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life."

The whole concept behind bin Laden's strategy was to turn us into hypocrites in the eyes of the world and in our own eyes as well. Victory -- true victory -- means ensuring that doesn't happen. The threat of attack will never go away entirely -- if that's the basis on which we decide such matters, we really are committed to perpetual state of war. And the strains that puts on our legal traditions, our economy, our psychology and our political systems will only mount over time.

As the chief drafter of our Constitution, James Madison, noted back in 1795, "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."