You mean like the secular and socialist Ba'athists?
The fact that we are not at war with each and every Muslim makes no difference, the salient fact is that everybody who is waging war against us is Muslim and they are waging thast war for religious reasons.
No, they are not waging a war for religious reasons, they are using religion to serve their ambitions. Religion is a rallying cry, but it is a neo-caliphate ambition that is driving the attacks on Muslims and non-Muslims both.
These tactics are not much different than what the NAZIs used to gain national support for their attacks leading to WWII. It was cultural identity that drove the purity and fatherland war cries.
It's been said that WWII was a war against facism. Albeit a popular phrase, the NAZIs were socialists and the Japanese were imperialists. I see these broadbrush claims of a religious war by Muslims much the same. It's easier to fit on a bumper sticker.
To make the cheese more binding, many Pakistani Muslims — who are not part of the middle-Eastern culture — are also at war with us.
I don't remember making the claim that we were at war with middle-Eastern cultured Muslims. We are at war with neo-caliphates. They are spread throughout the world. They are American, European, Indonesian, African and are densely populated in middle, middle-Eastern, central and south Asia. They share a common cultural ambition which is a rebirth of a global caliphate run from the holy lands. It is an Islamic caliphate and the fact that Muhammad ran every aspect of society certainly underlies the blurring of social functions in many of his followers minds, but the neo-caliphates are not pursuing a religious war as much as they are pursuing one of cultural identity.
The caliph was/is regarded as a successor of Muhammad and that makes the Jihad to recusitate the caliphate a religious endeavor.
Don't forget, in Islam the division of the civil from the religious is regarded as an artificial construct.
And the 'cultural identity' which the 'neo-caliphates' seek to establish is a world-wide fundamentalist Islamic theocracy.
Their stated aim is to force the world — all of to — to submit to their vision of Islam, and that makes it a religious war.