Friday morning it was all over the morning paper: the woman in the mask who will most likely be able to name her price for interviews if she can ever manage to recover from her wounds; a mangled tin can that had once been a double-decker bus; Tony Blair making like Winston Churchill. By Saturday it had a catchy new moniker, 7/7, which, if nothing else, should give the numerologically inclined something to chew on for a while. And by Sunday most of us were checking under our beds, snooping around our neighbours' garages for hidden bombs, and wondering aloud how we might all be able to starch our upper lips as stiffly as our unfazed cousins across the pond.

And on Monday, I opened the paper and read, way back there on page ten, the previous day's news from Iraq: 48 dead in a series of suicide attacks (seven in all), including 25 at a military recruiting centre (ah, the irony), eight members of a Baghdad Shiite family wiped out in their sleep, and five US soldiers wounded in another bomb attack.

So let's call that one 7/10.

As we continue to tick off the days, with no end in sight, one has to wonder whether anyone with the power to stop this madness actually wants to do so. Al-Qaeda certainly doesn't, either in Europe or in its lovely new recruiting ground in Iraq, graciously provided by the United States and Britain. Despite what Dick Cheney may suggest, if you're a Jihadist and in need of an army, there's no better place to start, and no better source of motivation.

America the liberator is America the occupier, out of circumstance, if not design, and a rather poorly organized one at that. Crime is rampant from Mosul to Basra, a state of chaos that has existed since day one when American troops were too busy protecting oil wells and looking for falling rose petals and victory parades than providing any measure of security for their newly acquired gas station. Under-staffed, over-taxed, war weary and unprepared for the length of stay or difference in culture, jittery soldiers not knowing how the next bomb will arrive, perhaps by car or perhaps by small school boy, have taken to shooting at just about anything that moves, including the innocent civilians that they once thought they were there to free.

But their Commander-in-Chief's resolve is still strong, and will be all the more so once he gets the expected boost in approval that always seems to follow a round of bombings, tough talk and speech making. For if there is one thing that can keep confused, generally peace-loving minds from asking nasty questions like "Why in God's name are we even there?" or perhaps "Can't we get more out of four billion dollars a week for two years than 2000 dead, 12000 wounded, and a smoking catastrophe that used to be Iraq?" it's good old-fashioned fear and loathing; fear of being bombed, and loathing of an enemy that is alien, inhuman, and ill-mannered enough to do its killing without expensive, economy-supporting American-made weaponry.

The West's interest in middle-eastern affairs for the last hundred years has focused on that black, sticky stuff that is now entirely too expensive to suit the nations of the world whose citizens need to wrap themselves in air-conditioned Ford Explorers every time they run out of eggs. It's bad politics to come out and say that the cost of a cheap trip in the RV last week was 48 dead, including seven children aged 2-14. One does not suggest, in polite company, that 50 people blown to bits in a subway is the price to be paid for affordable airfare to London.

Now, if you've got a war to wage, particularly one that is hard to define, has no end in sight, and where all parties involved are quite eager to keep going, well that's another matter entirely. Wars let the few control the many, and reduce true democracy to an exercise in sheep herding. And as long as we keep saying "Baa" instead of saying "No", caring more about the price of gas than the price of freedom, cowering in the corner instead of standing up in the streets, we might as well get used to the 9/11s and 7/7s, even if we've lost interest in the 7/10s.