It is far less glamorous and painstakingly slow to end the 'allure' through treating a cause instead of a sympton - but as any physician knows, it's the only long term cure. The 'Shock and awe' campaign has barely won any territory let alone the many hearts and minds, as so promised. In creating healthy 'tissue' the 'disease' can be isolated and eventually destroyed. I'm optimistic it will occur, after the inevitable pain and the sacrifice all the developed (and developing) nations will need to take.

And Americans wonder why no-one likes them, when all they do is kill anyone who stands in the way of them having their "Freedom and Democracy".... all at the expense of the rest of the planet.

New, non-Chinese saying: "Never stand between an American and a barrel of oil".

How do we turn the impoverished and disenchanted away from terrorism? If it’s money that will bring about eudaemonia and lasting peace we have played our role. Over the last 30 or so years the OPEC members have deposited $7 trillion. A large chunk of that found its way to the ME. Did the house of al-Saud use the money to build up sustainable industries? Did other oil rich ME countries invest in their own populations? The man in the street in Iran and Iraq might be better placed to answer that question but anecdotal evidence suggests that the leaders of those countries prefer war toys to car manufacturing plants. We even subsidise their proclivity for philoprogenitivity pursued in some blinkered belief that a higher authority will take care of the future.

What would the results be if those living in abject poverty in the remote parts of Pakistan were given the chance to respond to a questionnaire, with the leading question being: Are you happy that your government spent all that money developing a nuclear weapons capability rather than build sustainable industries? Parenthetically, a neighbouring country with a vastly numerically superior population and its own share of poverty has been identified as one of the countries that will prosper in this current century. That might indicate that poverty and lack of opportunity are not always the catalyst for a life of terrorism.

The religious tribalism which is now being played out on the streets of downtown Baghdad suggests that peace has no appeal for some within that alleged religion and the answer to terrorism might be a more even distribution of the wealth held by the governments of those countries where terrorism flourishes

"— little is done to discourage the supply of terrorists."

Ankon - you got it in one.

Given that we have terrorised so very many Iraqis to death, the irony is that we have to start so close to home. Always attend to your own terrorists first. It won't be cured by being fixated on "them over there". We must do our own pest eradication first.

Our terrorists wear suits, have a good superannuation scheme and carry a fat cheque book. They send other people's children to do their dirty work for them. They wrap themselves in OUR flag for comfort. They have jealously guarded their own narrow definition of "terrorism" - as though we could be so naive.

But we are not so naive, are we possums?

It won't be fixed until we elect politicians who reflect our natural goodwill towards one another. That goodwill is more potent than any second-hand Abrahams tank, carries more lasting firepower than an F-16, corrodes slower than a whole fleet of cruisers.

It's way over time to dump this present government AND their sycophants in the Labor Party, sever the economic tentacles that yanked their genitals and messed with their minds. It's gonna be a big, big cleanup job, but it's do-able for we Aussies.

- colour, creed and racial origins will not be an issue. We are better than that.

The entry into Iraq undoubtedly expressed a certain high level of naiveté with its lofty ideals (notwithstanding the very real undercurrent of an American dependence on oil). Religious and secular tribalism were barely accounted for – a similar tribalism as perhaps existent within our own affluent cities, but covered by a protective veneer of well-established polity (a birth-right some might throw away).

I would agree, it is simplistic to suggest that in merely ridding the world of poverty we apply a universal ‘Mr fix-it’ for all the world’s ills – after all, it is only realistic to expect a certain percentage of any population to be relatively deprived (no political form of ‘equal’ distribution has been proven yet to work). It would seem we are capable of only a procedural justice, if at all, rather than any distributive justice many perhaps dream about in order to bring about true equality.

Given the fundamental inequalities pervasive even within the wealthiest countries of the world and the intuitive injustice of this fact, the West has little right to merely trumpet a freedom the haughty ideals of democracy might bring.

"What enables these militants to attract a ballooning number of recruits? The answer cannot be Islam, which has been around for more than 1000 years. This is a recent problem." The author should try reading a book called White Gold by Giles Milton. It documents the capture and slavery of more than 1 million white Christian Europeans as slaves in Morocco and other north african and middle eastern muslim countries, dating back hundreds of years. The main driver? Islams contempt for the infidel. I would suggest that the raiding barbary corsairs were the days terrorists, as very few european coastal communities were unaffected.

That said, instead of trying to solve world poverty (a noble but lofty ambition), perhaps we should try to learn our lessons from terrorism problems that HAVE been solved. Wasnt it only 20 years ago that the IRA were still blowing up parts of London? Hasnt Libya notable cooled its heels? I'm not trying to say that the approaches and advances made in these cases (and there are others I'm sure) will be a one-sized fits all solution, but these are situations where the problems (of mass violence at least) have been solved. Surely we can extract some useful lessons from these. I include the IRA in particular to redraw attention to the fact that not all terrorists are middle-eastern or islamic extremists.