In response to the bombings in London, US President George W Bush stated that the USA is firm in its resolve to prosecute the "war on terror". This is, of course, consistent with the position he has held since the aeroplanes crashed into the World Trade Centre in 2001.

As I have said before, this is new use of the word "war", which is defined as

A state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties

Terror is a state of mind and not a Nation, State or Party of Individuals and, accordingly, it is an inaccurate use of the term "war".

If we however we accept this as a legitimate evolution of the word "war", then clearly the war is being won by the terrorists since, I believe it is fair to say, that people in the west are more scared now than they were in 2000 and possibly even more scared than they were in December 2001.

One could also raise legitimate questions over whether the west, in general, and the USA, in particular, have been guilty of terrorist acts themselves. If the definition of a terrorist act is one

the calculated use of violence (or threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimindation or coercion or instilling fear

Is the killing of innocent civilians in Iraq by means of a cluster bomb dropped from a US warplane any less of a terrorist act than the killing of innocent civilians via the detonation of a car bomb? I am not talking about the justification or otherwise for the act but merely whether it could be regarded as intimidating and instilling fear and it is difficult to understand how it could not.

Looking at it dispassionately, it is clear that it is difficult to understand how the tactic of terrorism can be eliminated when those seeking to eliminate it are practicing it themselves. Mike Spagat of Royal Holloway, University of London postulates that terrorist activity

might be the natural endpoint for all modern armed conflicts. Ongoing wars in Iraq and Colombia, which had quite different causes and began as very different kinds of conflict, are developing a characteristic signature of long-term terrorist activity.

Mary Kaldor, a political scientist at the London School of Economics and Political Science agrees. She says

US military action in Iraq has been predicated on the view that it is a war of the sort that was fought until the middle of the twentieth century, where two military states battle for control of a territory. The US failure to understand the reality in Iraq and the tendency to impose its own view of what war should be like is immensely dangerous.

If one is to understand how we have arrived at this point and where things are likely to proceed from here it is necessary to put aside our moral position and the fact that we are participants and view the Iraq conflict from the perspect of say a board game. The rise of insurgency in Iraq can be viewed as a direct result of the overwhelming force with which the war was initially prosecuted. Presumeably the intent of the "shock and awe" campaign was to rapidly instill a sense of defeat in the opposition in Iraq. Sadly, its real effect was the fragmentation of the opposition into small cells that are proving a highly effective resistance to the US occupation in Iraq.

"Why is this so effective?" The answer is disconcertingly simple. There appears to be a natural law that governs conflicts that was first enumerated by British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson around fifty years ago from studying battles within the context of the second world war. Conflicts in Iraq, Colombia and even England, appear comply with this numerical model.

The big question of course is whether there is actually a war to be won. If there is then it will not be won using a 20th mindset on how wars at to be conducted. The Metropolitan Police in London have a different and possibly more constructive perspective on the events that occured in London, referring to them a criminal acts that will be investigated in the same manner as other criminal acts that occur in London and whose perpetrators will be prosecuted using the standard judicial processes that exist within the British justice system. Their mindset is that this is not so much a war as a group of anti-social individuals who must be identified and the risks that they pose eliminated through, most likely, imprisonment.