s and a third of what they were during the Cold War years. Terrible though 9/11 was, it barely registers compared with the siege of Leningrad, the battle of the Somme or Vietnam. One thing has certainly changed. We didn’t know much about either the Somme or Leningrad, merely the bare bones of events, until months afterwards. Now we get war reporting in real time- either from reporters on the ground with their satellite communications or, as in the case of Syria, from the mobile phones of locals. Thus we feel ourselves caught up in endless conflicts. But it is an illusion. There have been no interstate wars for some time and the number of civil and ethnic wars has fallen steadily almost every year of the last twenty. There are about a quarter fewer than in 1990 and the last sustained territorial war between two regular armies was between Ethiopia...
