Putting aside the unrelenting U.S. propaganda and spin, it's time we reflected upon the following questions: Have the US-led anti-terror policies reduced the threat? Have they thwarted the ambitions of the terrorists or made them more determined? Have those policies quelled the terrorists' sense of injustice and anti-American sentiments, or rather fuelled them? Has the definition of 'terrorist' become too broad and too loose?

Prior to the war with the Taliban, Al Qaeda was mainly concentrated in Afghanistan with a visible, tangible presence in the form of training camps. There were, indeed, sleeper cells scattered around the planet but they were not at that time on the run. Al Qaeda's gripes were then clearly defined and were limited to Kashmir, Chechnya, and US bases on what they considered sacred Saudi soil. The Palestinian cause was tacked onto their grievances at a later date in an effort to whip up new recruits much to the annoyance of Yasser Arafat.

After the invasion of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda members went to ground and may well have multiplied, despite efforts to cut off their funding.

Before September 11, Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants were hardly household names, although Bill Clinton had launched an unsuccessful attack on Bin Laden in Afghanistan, following the embassy bombings in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen.

When the Bush administration took them on in such a high profile fashion, they suddenly became a magnet for ideologically inspired fanatics. Their notoriety has led to like-minded groups seeking them out or has spawned new alliances and copycat organizations worldwide using a similar modus operandi. Al Qaeda is now hydra-headed; its splinter groups and associates now have new gripes, Afghanistan and Iraq, and have added new names to their target list - Britain, Spain, Australia and Italy.

Today, there are more angry young men harbouring hatred towards many more countries. Worse they are spread around within Western societies, making them almost impossible to detect.

As we reflect on Bali, where Australian youth was targeted; the Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, which came under a rocket attack; the assaults on Western compounds in Saudi, and the bombs which went off near synagogues and at the British Embassy in Istanbul, not forgetting the 192 killed in Madrid, can we conclude that Bush is defeating those he calls "evildoers"?

The U.S. has behaved like the man who used a mallet to kill a fly on the head of a child. Instead of going on a rampage, it should have covertly identified and captured its enemies with the assistance of sympathetic governments - as most were post-9-11.

If it didn't possess experienced and multi-lingual humint, its friends in the Middle East did, and in time Al Qaeda could have been infiltrated. Secretly, without fanfare, the cells in the U.S. and Europe could have been exposed after wooing the communities in which they hid as well as use of advanced surveillance technology and better communication between different arms of the intelligence community.

Some believe the creation of the 'War on Terror' was a deliberate policy.

Writers Stephen Crockett and Al Lawrence in their article entitled 'Ending the "War on Terror" Myth' wrote: "The so-called 'War on Terror' is a dangerous myth that is undermining American national security. This myth is a deliberate creation of the Bush administration and their political allies. It has been very useful in promoting the corporate agenda of the Bush Republicans. Their fellow travellers in the corporate media have helped promote this intellectually dishonest way of looking at the threat posed to America by the Bin Laden terrorist organization".

So intellectually dishonest it has become that legitimate freedom fighters are now deemed 'terrorists', such as the Palestinian militant groups and the Lebanese-based Hizbollah even though they have restricted their activities to ousting Israel, the occupiers of Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian land.

Ariel Sharon, aka 'the Butcher of Beirut' has hijacked Bush's 'War on Terror' and uses it as a pretext to do his worst under its umbrella. Israeli government spokespersons, when asked to defend their country's aggressive stance towards Palestinians, invariably invoke the U.S. 'War on Terror'.

When asked why they rolled their tanks and bulldozers into Palestinian refugee camps and murdered civilians, they will say that Israel must fight terror. When taken to task on their policy of extra-judicial assassinations, they will designate the targeted victim as a 'terrorist' and even go as far as to compare him with Osama bin Laden, as they did with the elderly, wheelchair-bound Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, brutally executed while exiting his local mosque. They have even accused the duly elected Palestinian president Yasser Arafat of supporting terrorism and think nothing of publicly threatening his life too.

Due to this carefully calculated labelling on the part of Israel, Sharon has been able to convince George W. Bush, who is obsessed with fighting terrorists, both real and imagined, that he does not have a Palestinian partner with whom to negotiate. Thus, he has received carte blanche from the American president to pursue his own unilateral Mid-East policy, which virtually tears up the 'Roadmap'. Instead, Sharon has been given the green light to keep almost all Israeli settlements on the West Bank and to refuse the exiled Palestinians any right of return in exchange for Gaza, which has only 7,000 Jewish settlers.

In Iraq, words like "terrorists" and "terrorism" are being over-used to suit the Bush administration's spin on actual events on the ground. Until recently, the insurgency in Iraq was painted by the U.S. administration as the work of Saddam-supporting remnants with foreign terrorists flooding across the Iranian and Syrian borders (never those countries which are American allies, you'll note). The Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News calls all the insurgents 'terrorists', but doesn't explain how the 750 killed and more than 1,500 injured by U.S. troops in Falluja were terrorists when many of that number were women, children, babies and the elderly.

Many of the insurgents in Iraq were anti-Saddam and when the Americans and Britons first arrived in their country initially stood back with an open mind, hoping for a better future. The Shia population, for instance, who were repressed under Saddam, wanted to believe America's promise of democracy and freedom. But when an aide to the firebrand cleric Moqtada Sadr was arrested with Sadr demonstrators shot at by Marines and a pro-Sadr newspaper shut down, on the say-so of Paul L. Bremer, the coalition's promises of the right to free assembly and free speech appeared hollow.

Bush's cigar smoking viceroy, the current incumbent of Saddam's palace Bremer, managed to achieve the unification of Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis as never before. According to reports, Sunnis and Shiites fought side-by-side in Falluja when that town came under siege after the killing of four American mercenaries and, later, prayed together in the same mosques.

The U.S. is using the excuse that Iraq would descend into civil war if it did not maintain its troops on Iraq soil for decades to come. But this lie is being exposed as the Iraqi people come together in the face of a common enemy. Furthermore, every Iraqi I have spoken with denies a civil war is on the cards explaining that Iraqis have long lived side-by-side in harmony. The Iraqi people know that their future is in the hands of a U.S.-imposed puppet government, which will be in charge of schools, hospitals and local policing but will have little say over its country's defence, economy or, most importantly, its oil. The Iraqis are angry about this sham, the ordinary Iraqi people as opposed to 'terrorists'.

Writer and filmmaker John Pilger succinctly explains the deteriorating situation in Iraq and the burgeoning anti-Western feelings in the New Statesman.

"Four years ago, I travelled the length of Iraq…I seldom felt as safe in any country. Once in the Edwardian colonnade of Baghdad's book market, a young man shouted something at me about the hardship his family had been forced to endure under the embargo imposed by America and Britain. What happened next was typical of Iraqis; a passer-by calmed the man, putting his arm around his shoulder, while another was quickly at my side. 'Forgive him', he said reassuringly. 'We do not connect the people of the West with the actions of their governments. You are welcome'.

"Were I to undertake the same journey in Iraq today, I might not return alive. Foreign terrorists have ensured that. With the most lethal weapons that billions of dollars can buy, and the threats of their cowboy generals and the panic-stricken brutality of their foot soldiers, more than 120,000 of these invaders have ripped up the fabric of a nation that survived the years of Saddam Hussein, just as they oversaw the destruction of its artefacts. They have brought to Iraq a daily, murderous violence, which surpasses that of a tyrant [Saddam Hussein] who never promised a fake democracy."

Pilger has a point. Like beauty, defining who is or isn't a terrorist is in the eye of the beholder. When Israel sends missiles into heavily populated areas of Palestinian towns is this not inflicting terror? When tanks fire randomly into busy market places does this not elicit terror? When U.S. bombs dropped on Iraqi towns and cities during an operation called 'Shock and Awe' what is this, if not terrorism in its most devastating form? When over 400 Iraqi women, children and the elderly were incinerated by U.S. buster-bunking bombs while seeking refuge in Baghdad's Ameriyya air-raid shelter during the 1991 Gulf War, the imprints of their bodies seared into the walls, was this not the result of state terrorism? The U.S. had been given the shelter's coordinates in advance and told of its benign purpose.

We now live in a world where those with F16s, Apache gun-ships, sophisticated tanks and armoured personnel carriers carrying out murderous policies half-way around the world are considered 'the good guys', while individuals defending their own land from foreign invaders are 'terrorists'. On our planet, those with might are invariably considered right. In this New World Order the poor and the disenfranchised can be trampled on with impunity their lives less significant than those the citizens of so-called civilized, wealthy democratic nations.

The arrogant policies of Bush and his rightwing, neo-con advisors are threatening world peace as never before. Their 'War on Terror' is open-ended. It does not stop with Afghanistan and Iraq. It will not stop with the Patriot Act and Homeland Security. It is not limited to depriving the inmates of Guantanamo of their judicial rights, racial-profiling of Arabs and Moslems, and using fear tactics to control their own people. They plan to forcibly 'democratise' the entire region with Syria and Iran next on their list. As nations shrink back from standing up to them, including most of the Arab world, their 'War on Terror' should be re-named a 'Terrorizing War'.

The merchants of terror can only be stopped when the American people go to the polls in November provided they vote for the Democratic candidate John Kerry. Unlike Bush, Kerry is an internationalist who cares about the opinions of the outside world and plans to take a more multi-national approach. It will take years, or even decades, for America to regain the international respect it once enjoyed and its honest broker status. If Bush grabs a second term, a true clash of civilizations - long predicted by Samuel P. Huntingdon in his book endorsed by Henry Kissinger - is likely to be the depressing and inevitable result.