U.S. Corrects Report to Show Rise in Terrorism. The State Department said that acts of terror worldwide increased slightly last year and the number of wounded rose dramatically. By The Associated Press. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]
The findings had been used by senior Bush administration officials to bolster President Bush's claim of success in countering terrorism.
Now wait just a minute - you cannot kill an ism and in many cases, you cannot even slow it down, regardless of how hard you try. In the case of terrorism you are dealing with something that has been around for a long time and is likely to remain a part of the human existence for generations to come.
I have to feel sorry for the modern professional soldier. I doubt any of them signed up for the fight they now have on their hands. Certainly you can argue that they are doing it for the common good, but there is a difference when you are fighting against other professionals and when you are not. The exalted Geneva Conventions are agreements between professional soldiers, which means that each side in the conflict is really there to win under a very formal set of rules. War is hell as the saying goes, but it is usually a very formalized hell with rules for engagement and withdrawal, encounters with the enemy and what happens when either side captures the other. In most cases, it behooves each side to treat an enemy as well as possible, in the hopes that at the end of the conflict, any captured prisoners will be returned in good condition. Whether you consider this from the public relations standpoint (so the folks at home get behind the war) or from the financial standpoint (it means that new soldiers don't have to be trained) or from the standpoint that it is "just a job" and one soldier won't kill another unless he has to doesn't matter. The end result is the same.
However, terrorism, the act of terrorizing a target is a whole new ball game. It isn't that the Geneva Conventions don't apply, it is that one side of the game isn't playing by the rules. The followers of Al-Qaeda are not professional soldiers and therefore don't have to play by the rules. So as a result the various military functions send up against them are forced to follow rules that don't tie up the terrorists. This is what makes defeating them so difficult. In fact, new rules are created in an erroneous effort to gain victory because it goes against our nature to "throw out the rules" for fear that others will do the same. Some might say this is no different that the War of Independence that the US Colonies fought against the British in 1776 and beyond. I would argue that even then, you had two teams of professional soldiers. Sure, the colonial army wasn't very professional looking by most definitions, and the certainly did a lot of guerilla warfare, but the rules of behavior were not much different than the wars before or after, even if the tactics were.
The war against terrorism isn't a war. There are no rules that define the engagement and that is what will continue to hamstring the effort to win. You can only survive.
4:43:24 PM 
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