The world is currently in a phase of asymmetric warfare. By that I mean hostilities in which the two sides have available to them different weapons, and use different strategies and tactics. Government forces still on the whole are based on traditional structures and use conventional tactics; the 'non-state actors' on the other side use, at the moment, urban guerrilla tactics mostly, in Iraq and elsewhere. President Bush has tried to create a sort of moral halo round the operations there by calling them part of the 'War on Terror', but more and more they are in fact approximate to a Hobbesian 'war of all against all.' The conflict includes a civil war between Sunni and Shia for eventual political control of Iraq, a nationalist campaign against the occupation forces, assorted tribal and clan operations to pay off old scores, and the jihadists' war against the US. That last is the only one which has any relation to the War on Terror, and it probably constitutes the smallest element in the overall disaster.

That disaster was to my mind entirely predictable from the original US choice of Iraq as an allegedly advantageous battlefield. There is no doubt at all that this was a 'war of choice', one that some Pentagon intellectuals had been wanting ever since the slightly inconclusive outcome of the Gulf War of 1990-1. The then Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, urged it on the President as early as November 2001, when the first troops were being sent to Afghanistan. In the words of one of the most influential journalistic hawks, the enterprise was to change 'the internal structure of Arab regimes and in a larger sense the culture of the Arab/Islamic world' to something 'more democratic and tranquil and accomodationist.’ Quite an ambition, but the choice of Iraq as the battlefield to achieve it is inexplicable, save on the basis of Bob Woodward's remark about the policy makers and others he was interviewing for his three books on the war, 'the level of ignorance was pitiable'.

Even among Republicans in Washington, the Iraq invasion is now widely considered to have been one of the most disastrous strategic errors of recent US military history, worse in its prospective consequences than Vietnam. In my view it was the same error, or perhaps pair of errors, repeated: the wrong choice of battlefield, and under-rating the enemy. Vietnam until the final push of 1975 had also been waged as asymmetric war, though that term was not current at the time. It did not seem to come into widespread use until the jihadists' attack on the US destroyer Cole in 2000, and perhaps ought to be reserved for operations after that date.

Obviously, conventional armies since at least Roman times have been confronted with local resistance forces conducting guerrilla operations of varying levels against them, but the current jihadist operations seem to deserve that more portentous name on three grounds. First, that their ambitions are global: nothing less than a change in the structure of power in the society of states, which actually makes their campaign a hegemonial war, at least in aspiration. Second, that their capacity to mount operations is also world-wide. Third, that their target is mostly the disruption of civilian life, though military targets like the Cole are chosen when opportunity offers. Possibly the change of name will do something to step up efforts to combat this form of warfare more effectively. It certainly will not be advanced if there should be another choice of so ill-considered a battlefield as Iraq (like Iran, for instance).

The most relevant battlefields are within the Western world, and the most vital operations are those of intelligence and police services. But this current kind of threat has two things in common with the old terrorist operations, like those of the IRA against the British Government. First, it may well be a 'generational' struggle. When you defeat asymmetric opponents, they do not stay defeated. They withdraw, lie low for a while, and raise their sons to resume the struggle. Second, they can operate with remarkable economy of means: the IRA conducted its campaign against successive British governments for thirty years (1969-1999) on the basis, allegedly, of only about 200 agents 'on active service' at any one time. So they are a formidable threat, and deserve more careful analysis than they have been getting, especially on the political side. As someone once said, there are no military solutions available, only political ones.