We[1] prefer "War on Poverty / Crime / Violence / Drugs / Terror / random_abstract_noun". It lets us[2] assert exceptional wartime powers. The problem / advantage of this tactic is that there is no "side" to cry uncle.
Actually, the real problem is that people become desensitized to the word "war", and don't have anything else to use for times it really is appropriate. This re-mapping of words to useless concepts is frequently intentional, e.g.: Weapons of Mass Destruction, to conflate the ideas of relatively harmless and / or difficult-to-implement bio and chem weapons with nukes.
[1] That's the royal "we", which in this case means elected officials.
[2] See [1].