The "War on Terror"

Not going very well, is it? I mean we've had a few incidents in the far east, Turkey and the Middle East and of course the Madrid catastrophe. Then there have been rumours of Islamic fundamentalists poised to wreak havoc in Luton and Wembley and of course 600 or so arrests of potential terrorists in the UK - although only 6 of them had given any real cause for concern. We even had someone working here at Swipe Towers who was arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act - although why he'd put "blowing up western infidel scum as part of a worldwide jihad in the name of Allah" down as one of his interests, I'll never know. No major attacks on the US mainland post 9-11 - although there was a local father and son team who at least had a go. But, aside from the above and the odd dodgy video clip of dire warnings from OBL made in between dialysis sessions, really this "War on Terror" has been a bit one sided, hasn't it? I mean you could hardly call al-Quaeda as commited to the cause as the Coalition, could you? In terms of casualties and strategic territorial advantage, they're just not in it, are they? Apart from the odd foothill in between Pakistan and Afghanistan and most of Saudi Arabia, they're just not on the map, are they? Whereas we've got Kabul, Baghdad and a few of its outlying suburbs almost under control - and the massive oil fields and pipelines of the region are all under 24 hour guard. They may have taken out a few hundred of our lads, but we've killed literally thousands of them - many of them fiendishly masquerading as innocent civilians. I mean, if this was WWII and we were the Allies and they were the Axis powers, we'd have reached Berlin in about 4 hours, presuming you'd had the equivalent of EuroStar back then - although there could well have been delays caused through having to change at Bruxelles I suppose. No opposition at all from the axis of evil though - relatively speaking. OK, so they made a good start, but you'd have to say, on balance, that since about 13th September 2001, it's really been all Coalition, hasn't it? Which really begs the question, should we be fighting a "war on terror" at all? Wouldn't Britain be a much safer place if we fought, for instance, the "war on Rail Track" instead?