'We Are at War'

Melanie Phillips notes how Professor Gwyn Prins, one of the authors of the RUSI report
(RUSI is the leading forum in the UK for national and international Defence and Security) referencing the report on BBC Radio observed that 'we are at war', although we are behaving as if we are in peacetime. As the report asks:

Is there any longer a clear distinction between being at war and not being at war? A declaration of war is almost inconceivable today, and yet both our defence and security services are in action against active forces, abroad and at home, at this moment.

The resulting confusion and unease, the report suggests, has produced

uneasy similarities with the years just before the First World War.

Too many in that establishment cannot get their heads round the fact that, while what we are up against is not war as conventionally understood, ie aggression between states, it is much more than terrorism (not to mention ‘crime’ as the government would have it) because of the strategic goals, which are the overthrow of the west. Partly because the establishment persists in thinking that as this is such a preposterous proposition (how can people stuck in the 7th century possibly ever overthrow the most powerful civilisation in the history of the planet? Too ridiculous for words, dear boy!) it could never happen and therefore should not be taken seriously, and partly because that establishment is so terrified by the implications of a religious war of cultural conquest that it takes refuge in a myriad different fatuous other explanations for what is happening.