So we all effectively strip naked at airports, do we, in the cause of freedom. How is that being free? Airport officials who like the work now look at nude images of nine-year-old girls. How is that being free? How is that defending freedom, not losing it?

And we bomb Yemen now, do we, to show how wrong they were to make fools of us with their exploding underpants. How is that useful? How will that deter terrorists, bring down the number of terrorists? It will bring up the number, surely.

And we keep Guantanamo open, do we, because Yemenis back in Yemen might break free, and put on exploding underpants and board British Airways and fly to New York. We keep Guantanamo open though the US President says 'it's a recruiting poster for terrorists'.

How does this help? How does this help in any way?

The fact is, we've lost. We've lost the arms race with the terrorists. They now have exploding underpants. Which means they can turn up in Times Square on New Year's Eve and blow up a hundred people. Or they can turn up in the Opera House and blow up an orchestra. They can turn up at a Cricket Test and blow up the Members' Stand.

How can they not do this? How can we stop them? We can't.

There are twenty million, probably, young men and boys, and maybe a million women and girls, willing to put on exploding underwear and mingle with the infidel, mingle with them long enough to blow up a few of them. Which means they can kill, if they want to, sixty million of us.

We have lost this war. We should seek a truce with the victors. We should see if we can discern what they want, and decide what proportion of it we can give to them.

We did this in Vietnam. We gave them the whole country, fleeing in lurching helicopters and kicking embassy servants off their rope ladders and ditching them in the sea. We did this in Cuba after the Missile Crisis, guaranteeing fifty years of Castroism, which has thus far done us no harm. We did this in Indonesia, by giving them West New Guinea, and, for a time, East Timor. We did this in Korea, by abandoning our plans to invade or nuke Red China, and signing a truce that is still in place, and letting Red China into the UN.

What do the terrorists want?

Our armies out of Iraq, it seems, and our armies are going. Our armies out of Afghanistan, where they're eventually leaving anyway. It's hard to ask a young man to be the last young man to die for the drug-running Karzai brothers and it's getting harder. Israel's air force out of Gaza, Bethlehem, Hebron. Most of the world wants that too, though the American armaments lords like selling high-tech rockets to Israel

What else do they want? Oh yes, the US armies out of the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia. Well, they've already left.

Is there anything else? I don't think so. Do they want to forcibly convert America to Islam by terror-bombing them into submission? Don't think so. They know they'd be nuked if they tried.

So what they want is pretty much what eighty percent of the West wants now.

Why not give it to them?

There doesn't have to be a written surrender. Just a mild-mannered withdrawal, tiptoeing out, over a year or two, of Christian armies from Muslim countries.

The Terror would cease then. Or come down to 'acceptable levels'.

Though it's always been at acceptable levels, really, if you look at it proportionally.

Consider these figures.

The number of white Christians or white agnostics killed by terrorists in the last ten years is around 4,500. This includes those killed by 9/11, the Bali bombings, the Madrid, London and Glasgow bombings, the occasional assassination of a UN official, a CIA operative, a Russian who is hardline over Chechnya, the occasional death on a pirate ship.

But this number is less than the number killed in that time on New South Wales roads, which is about five thousand. And four hundred and twenty thousand less than the number killed on US roads. And forty-two million less than the number killed worldwide by cigarettes.

Yet no-one has bombed General Motors or SAAB or Phillip Morris. No-one has proposed to fire-bomb Detroit, bomb it back to the Stone Age.

And billions upon billions have been spent on electronic devices at airports and in parliament houses and government offices that are now superseded and never worked anyway. I got my Swiss Army knife into three parliament buildings on nine occasions, and was sprung only twice. And I could have been Sirhan Sirhan or Charlie Manson.

No, old friend, no. No; no. We should budget for terrorist deaths, the way we do for tobacco deaths, and road accident deaths. We should sigh and say it's a pity and counsel terrorists not to be terrorists in advertising campaigns, and write the dead off.

It's just too costly spending the money we do getting nowhere.

Or perhaps you think letting strangers look at your nine-year-old daughter naked is worth it. Worth it to save five hundred lives this year, if we do, and a hundred next year, if we do.

We'd be better off spending the money on safer seatbelts. Or fire-bombing fields of tobacco in Alabama. Or curing diabetes. This would save more lives.

The War on Terror is a racket. It's made Blackwater a billion dollars, and the Military-Industrial Complex five hundred billion thus far from pilotless rockets that blow up children. Money that might have beaten back AIDS in Africa, and saved more lives.

Four and a half thousand dead in ten years. A drop in the ocean. Seven hundred thousand Rwandans died in a couple of weeks. Fifty thousand Iraqis died in a year. Three million fled their country (including all the dentists) in three years. And twenty Muslims die in car bombings every other day.

Why are we stripping naked in airports?

Are we mad?

Or following the wrong advice?

How does this help our image as a civilised people?

We look like fools. Hysterical fools.

Chicken Littles on speed. Idiots. Chiliasts howling 'prepare to meet thy doom'.

We should start tiptoeing out of the Muslim countries, very soon.

Or perhaps you have a better idea.