Amos - 26 Apr 04 - 12:38 PM

IMO you are wrong. "Terrorism" is not a condition, it is a fact, a fact that quite large chunks of this world have had to deal with for much of the last fifty years. Measures taken by individual countries to combat "terrorism" during that period were hampered by other factors, the main draw-back being the polarisation created by the "cold war".

What we are faced with today is nothing new, a wide variety of disparate groups, motivated by loosely connected aims. The whole of Europe faced this in the 70's and 80's.

What 9/11 changed was that the USA itself was struck and virtually over-night the entire perspective changed. When the marker was put down - "You are either with us, or against us" - reinforced by what the world's potential supporters of terrorist saw in Afghanistan, things changed dramatically. The one thing those groups of the 70's and 80's could rely on was that during the "cold war" years the USSR and it's satellites were only too pleased to back them in their efforts to destabilise the west. Al-Qaeda and like-minded groups have no such support. International co-operation over a whole raft measures is being experienced at an unprecedented level. Those groups will continue to plot, they will continue to attack, but their task of remaining at large and undetected gets harder by the day, they have no goal, no aim that their support can see being achieved - time is not on their side.