The Bush administration and the Pentagon have tried on various names for it, the latest one being the "Long War". Branding wars is a tricky business and one probably best left to the historians.

I doubt Edward III employed branding consultants after the Battle of Crecy in 1346 and said, right lads, this thing isn't near over yet . . . let's call it the Hundred Years War.

On Channel Four tomorrow night, historian Niall Ferguson will present the third instalment of his excellent series War of the World, a controversial retelling of 20th century wars, not as disjointed bits like the Somme, Iwo Jima, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam, but as a single century-long conflict with different phases. This might be fine for historians after the fact, but you can't tell people in the moment.

Because nobody wants to fight a Hundred Years War.

It's depressing. It's too much.

It's like being strapped to a seat in a theatre watching some horrifically crap student play with no discernable plot or end in sight. Wars are, ultimately, stories. And a story needs an ending.

I reckon that the human mind sees war as something that lasts about five years.

It's coming up to the fifth anniversary of 9/11, and it seems that we . . . Americans and the world . . . have decided that the war is over.

Don't believe me? Consider two things that happened last week.

First, the New York Times revealed the existence of a covert programme to sift through the records at SWIFT, the Brussels-based clearing house of some 8,000 banks. Your bank is almost certainly a member. Every day SWIFT handles some 64,000 transactions from Irish individuals and businesses.

Critics accused the newspaper of treason for revealing a programme aiding US intelligence efforts in time of war.

There are two things to note about this. First, the New York Times probably wouldn't have revealed the programme in autumn 2001. Second, if it had, most people would be quite happy about it.

In fact, if I'd found out some Eurotrash banker weenies had refused to let our boys track money going from rogue elements within Islamic charities in south Dublin to alQaeda cells blowing up embassies in Africa, I'd be pretty angry. Now, my first thought is, what if they used it to pull the wrong guy with a similar-sounding Arab name off the streets of Hamburg and chuck him in some secret prison in the Jordanian desert? Which means I had the same first thought as Michael D Higgins, which makes me feel icky.

Second, the US Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the president couldn't simply make up rules to try people being held in Guantanamo Bay, as he'd argued since November 2001. The people being held there now have to be sent to civilian courts, unless the US Congress passes a law setting up special courts to try them, like Ireland's special criminal court.

It was a massive rebuke by a supposedly right-wing court to much of the Bush Administration's approach to fighting this war. The US Supreme Court has made other decisions that limit a president's power in time of war, like ex parte Milligan. But those decisions were taken after the war was over. Milligan, for example, ruled that ad hoc military tribunals couldn't try people where the civil courts were still functioning. But they ruled in 1866, a year after the US Civil War was over.

What's changed? The sense of imminent threat has gone and scepticism is back in vogue. But really, it's because people feel like it's just time for the war to be over. The historians will have to decide, if another set of buildings come down, who was tragically shortsighted . . . the punters who want the war story to be over, or the leaders who couldn't wrap it up before the audience began to look for the exit.