The bombing of the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad exposes yet again the absurdity of attempts to portray the wave of violence in Iraq as other than a vicious and calculated campaign of terror. The International Committee of the Red Cross is one of the world's most respected international aid agencies. It is not a foreign occupation force, much less an extension of American power. It is a humanitarian agency - one of the few left in Baghdad - attempting in difficult circumstances to provide needy Iraqis with food, water and emergency medical care.

The only conceivable aim of those involved in the suicide bombing of the ICRC's Baghdad offices was to disrupt, if not devastate, the humanitarian relief effort in Iraq: to maximise the death and suffering of Iraqis; to maximise the intimidation of those involved in rebuilding Iraq; and to maximise the chaos.

In anyone's language, this was an unconscionable act of terror.

So why are some of the world's media still walking on eggshells, groping for euphemisms such as "organised resistance" as if attempting somehow to legitimise these bleakest of atrocities?

Sadly, the media is really only reflecting the failure of the international system over many years to settle on a universal standard to define the crime of terrorism.

Asymmetric warfare against the power and symbols of the West appears to have become the strategy of choice in these early years of the 21st century. This imposes a new range of tests for all stakeholders in the international system.

However, the system is struggling to respond. We see, for example, the world go to all the trouble of setting up a new International Criminal Court without giving it jurisdiction over the crime of terrorism per se. Why not?

The way through the dilemma is to focus on the nature of the target. By this criterion, terrorism pretty much defines itself.
The reason is the lack of a consensus on what exactly constitutes an act of terror. As last month's report of the International Bar Association's Task Force on Terrorism acknowledged, all attempts to agree on a definition under international law have failed. The UN has been on the case for many years, with little progress.

The terms of the debate are by now familiar: "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." In the Middle East, this has become code language for extending a blanket exemption to Palestinian extremists who target Israeli civilians on school buses, at seaside cafes, shopping malls or nightclubs.

This is the conflict at the heart of the definitional dispute. But for how much longer can these semantics go on?

More than any other event, September 11 brought the global security debate - and, specifically, the phenomenon of mega-terror - into the day-to-day preoccupations of hundreds of millions of citizens in the developed world. In Australia, this was doubly reinforced by the Bali bombings. Many of the 88 Australians killed were young adults, and all were innocents in any meaningful sense of the word.

The post-September 11 obligation imposed by the Security Council requires that all member states "refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts". Under the mandate of Security Council resolution 1373, they must shut down terrorist financing and training, as well as arrest or exclude the actors who seek to maim and kill civilians as a political stratagem.

It sounds straightforward enough. Not so.

It is worth noting a letter from Syria, a current member of the UN counter-terrorism committee, to the president of the Security Council in response to these attempts to frame a concerted international response: "Inasmuch as Security Council resolution 1373 (2001) lacks any clear definition of the concept of terrorism or of the terrorist acts or entities to be combated, the Syrian Arab Republic has based itself, in the present reply, on its commitments under the 1998 Arab Convention for the suppression of terrorism, which distinguishes between terrorism and the legitimate struggle against foreign occupation."

In effect, Syria, a serving member of the Security Council, elevates the Arab League Convention, adopted in Cairo three years ago, above its obligations to the UN. Syria is not alone.

In her recently published book attacking the Howard Government's controversial attempts to strengthen Australia's counter-terrorism laws, Jenny Hocking provides a summation of what might be called the relativist approach to this debate.

In Terror Laws: ASIO, Counter-Terrorism and the Threat to Democracy, Hocking says terrorism is a term mired in ambiguity, its meaning culturally and politically defined. She cites approvingly an opinion published in the Alternative Law Journal last year, which insists that "terrorism exists only in the eye of the Western beholder; it has no independent reality".

Hocking goes on to complain that the use of the term by Western governments "abstracts specific instances of political violence from their political and social contexts" and "averts consideration of complex questions of causation".

In the spirit of Noam Chomsky, she argues there is a sense in which the war on terror "is all about language".

All this may pass for a worthy debate in some legal and academic circles but, in appraising events such as the bombing of the Red Cross offices, and in searching for consistent and coherent responses, this approach becomes not only circular but surreal.

The unwillingness to accept the application of a universal standard - or even to acknowledge the possibility of a universal standard - is long-standing, and unlikely to change.

But, surely, the way through the dilemma is to focus not on the nature of the cause, but the nature of the target. By this criterion, terrorism pretty much defines itself.

Any and all attempts either by state or non-state actors to plan or perpetrate the deliberate mass murder of innocent civilians with the calculated aim of advancing an ideological or political cause must be deemed terrorism, and a crime against humanity.

Anything less than a universal standard cast in these terms is almost certainly a double standard. And it is a double standard that has paralysed this debate for far too long.