Is it post-modern terror, post-industrial terror, or post-terror terror? ETA placed small bombs on highways outside of Madrid on a national holiday, creating motoring havoc. No one was hurt and the bombs were tiny enough not to do much damage.

Driving in DC beltway traffic, I've often thought if you wanted to shut down the U.S. the DC Beltway is a strategic chokepoint. My thoughts were generally more catastrophic - easy enough to imagine a traffic jam becoming a killing field.

But ETA's attack goes a different way - terrorism as an annoyance. Interesting question if small, disciplined nationalist groups will turn to more and more modulated violence that is meant to annoy rather than terrorize. Murdering is bad for the group's reputation but low level violence might be useful in keeping the situation agitated. In wealthy democracies this may prove to be a very useful tactic.

On the other hand, other groups, like al-Qaeda, will turn to larger and larger scale violence to kill as many as possible.

If this trend occurs the two phenomena may diverge until they cannot really be discussed together in any meaningful way.