I try very hard to avoid being dramatic, but the point of view that you’ve adopted is the very definition of the perpetual war described by Orwell in 1984.

We may very well be able to defeat Islamic extremism (though I’m not optimistic, given our current tactics), but not even Stalinist tactics can squelch small acts of crime and political discontent.

I posted this under war on terror before all the details came in. I updated with the results after that. I would still put it under this label though.

Indeed, this was an act of terrorism, whether a real bomb or not. It has always been called this. The mere threat of a bomb is an act of terrorism because it seeks to invoke terror.

I don’t dispute that the very nature of a bomb threat qualifies it as “terrorism”, but surely you can appreciate the difference in nature between al-Qaida, Ted Kaczynski, and Johnny Teenager. The “war on terror” was only supposed to target one of the three. The other two are domestic law enforcement issues.

This is why I hate the very term “war on terror”. It was originally meant as a euphemism for the war on Islamic extremism because we didn’t want anyone thinking we were embarking on a holy war. But it’s so unbelievably vague that it can be used to describe any action which might in any way scare someone. It didn’t take long at all for the phrase to be applied to run-of-the-mill pranks and nutjobs.