KEY POINTS:
Don't repeat this too loudly yet but the war on terror may be over. That might be hard to believe in a week the British police have discovered a cell of Islamic doctors behind the car bombs that nearly caused carnage in central London and Glasgow last weekend.
Doctors, for heavens sake, foreign-born and working in British hospitals, led by a "brilliant" neurosurgeon from Jordan, all of them professionally sworn to promote health and save life. And they were conspiring, it seems, to stage another bloody spectacle for the Islamist cause.
Imagine what Tony Blair would have said. "If ever the world needed further convincing that these people pose a threat to civilisation itself, surely it is the discovery that this evil, fanatical perversion of Islam has penetrated even the medical profession." Something like that.
No doubt George Bush has been beating that drum again this week but nobody is listening to him any more. Blair still had credibility and Blair is gone.
Britain's new Prime Minister Gordon Brown barely had his feet under Blair's desk before the bombs were sent to test him. Brown's response was merely sober: "I want all British people to be vigilant and want them to support the police and all the authorities. I know the British people will stand together united, resolute and strong."
That was about the size of it; nothing to terrify anybody, no attempt to exaggerate the threat, no more need to use these crimes as justification for causing the debacle in Iraq.
The deadly doctors must be disappointed. That is why I think the war on terror is over.
Even the Economist, I notice, has started putting inverted commas around the phrase. It was only ever a rhetorical war, no more real than "wars" on crime, or drugs or obesity, which we hear of from time to time. But "terror" had more credibility for a time because the World Trade Centre fell down.
I'm not easily scared but I was that morning. Woken in the early hours, I was in time to see the first tower burning on television and the plane go into the second tower.
The fear was akin, I think, to what it must feel like to be in a country under attack. For several hours, nobody knew the scale of the thing. The foundations of our existence were shaking.
By dawn in New Zealand the danger was over and the damage known. But the United States had been awake through the hours of uncertainty and I can understand the terror there.
The "war" is not over in the minds of most Americans yet. Their TV networks and newspapers still run the drumbeat of 9/11 and credit "al Qaeda" with every act of sabotage. But the Democrats running for President will emulate Gordon Brown.
Once the war is downgraded to what it really always was, a criminal surveillance operation, we need to find a more useful word for the crime.
"Terrorism" is a ridiculous term. Apart from those few hours of 9/11 most people have not been terrified by the possibility of an aircraft being hijacked or bombs exploding in commuter trains.
After the London bus and underground bombings two years ago people went straight back on the trains. I flew around the world last month and never heard a nervous word.
Admittedly, the security screens at airports are reassuring, but like all conventional forces the screeners are fighting the last war. Even in New York they can laugh about that now.
"What's with the juice bottles and shoe inspections?" I heard a stand-up comic ask. "That's so 2006. They should be checking bobby pins and M&M's, especially the blue ones."
This is not to suggest we have seen that last outrage from suicidal Islamists, or even the worst they might do. But we are unlikely now to hear they pose a threat to civilisation as we know it.
The BBC long ago banned the word terrorism from its bulletins because its informational value was zero. The term exaggerates the impact of the crime and probably glorifies it in alienated circles.
A massacre, or attempted massacre, is no less criminal for its psycho-political motive.
To help police monitor the danger the public needs to understand the pathology. The mindset of dangerous young Muslims in Western societies is not so very different, I suspect, from that of other rebel movements Europe has seen in recent times.
Germany's Baader Meinhof gang, Italy's Red Brigades, various nationalists such as the IRA, Black September, the PLO, have wanted to shock and hurt rich and strong societies that they believe, rightly or wrongly, despise their values, priorities, ethnic or religious character.
And when they commit atrocities in that belief, it is self-fulfilling. The best defence is a response that does not feed their self-importance.
Britain's new Prime Minister has made a good start.
