We have lost the ability to win a peace. We have lost the ability to win a war. And now we have lost the ability even to name one.

In fact, we may have lost the most important skill of all - the ability to rewrite history.

Once again, Israel is in need of volunteer aid, both domestic and foreign. We cannot name the war. Perhaps someone out there can.

A ministerial committee met on Monday, in essence, to declare war. Eight months in arrears. With all of the ill-advised, half-cocked bellicosity of Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz, no one declared war last July. They promised us that Israel would lash out in a "resolute and harsh manner," they promised us that we would fight until the kidnapped IDF soldiers were returned, they promised us to lift the rocket threat from the cities, towns, and villages of the north, they promised a new order in Lebanon.

But they never copped to the word war.

Now, with the same cool-headed bureaucratic blunderment with which they dispatched young soldiers and old to war without proper armor, without proper training, without proper medical evacuation preparation, without clear aims - even without food and water - competing committees, one from the Olmert side, one from Peretz, have failed to reach agreement on a name for the war.

Little wonder. They certainly can't use the name of the first Lebanon war, which was officially designated Operation Peace for Galilee. Not for a war which, as a result of unceasing missile strikes by Hezbollah against civilian targets, drove the entire region underground or fleeing to other areas of Israel.

Similarly, you can't call the war the Second Lebanon War, because the first one was nominally an operation, not a war. Other proposals would call the conflict "Peace in the North," the "Northern Shield War," or the "Between the Strictures War," this last a reference to the Jewish mourning period marking the last days of the ancient Temple.

While we're at the task of rewriting history, we might also choose to ignore Israel's bombardment of Lebanon, which cost large numbers of civilian casualities while apparently doing little to curb Hezbollah's capabilities.

The result has been, that Israeli spokesmen, diplomats, and politicians have spent months dancing around the name, describing "the fighting in summer," the battle, the campaign, the confrontation. Anything but a war.

So it would probably have remained, had bereaved parents, brothers and sisters of fallen soldiers not forced the government's hand. Parents threatened to change military tombstones with their own hands, to change the approved awkward inscription "killed in battle in Lebanon" to read "fell in war in Lebanon."

Now a committee of cabinet ministers has agreed. The stones will read as the parents requested. It will called a war.

But they still can't decide what the war was.

So here's your chance. We're outsourcing history. Name that war.