Simon Jenkins explains here why Blair is wildly exaggerating the threat posed by terrorism and how, craving a monstrous enemy, the prime minister has vastly overstated this supposed threat to world security.

"After 1990 many hoped that an age of stable peace might dawn. Rich nations might disarm and combine to help the poor, advancing the cause of global responsibility. Instead two of history's most internationalist states, America and Britain, have returned to the trough of conflict, chasing a chimera of 'world terrorism', and at ludicrous expense. They have brought death and destruction to a part of the globe that posed no strategic threat. Now one of them, Tony Blair, stands in a patch of desert to claim that 'world security in the 21st century' depends on which warlord controls it. Was anything so demented?"