The two attacks on London and the horrific, apparently Bedouin abetted, attacks at Sharm al-Sheikh seem to me to provide further proof of Michael Scheuer's analysis of the "global war on terror" actually existing as a war on the West by a global Islamic Jihad insurgency, a completely different paradigm than the leadership seems to be on or seems able to admit.

After Zawahiri's latest love letter to Blair and Bush, it has really crystallized for me the fact that Bin Laden's second greatest wish, following our foolhardy invasion of Iraq, has finally come true. The seeds that Al-Qaeda has been planting for 10+ years in the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan seem to have taken fervent root and are approaching full bloom. Much discussion in the West seems to be centered on whether the good Egyptian doctor actually was taking credit for any of the July bombings. I think that this discussion, outside of a bar room argument with as much meaning as who should be the fourth pitcher out of the Cubs bullpen, is really beside the point.

Even if Al-Qaeda's leadership didn't order some or all of these attacks, they were clearly abbetted by the decade of training for asymmetric warfare and modern information dissemination capabilities supplied by Al-Qaeda. By training up to 100,000 bodies by some estimates at their camps and then dispersing their trainees all over the globe, from upstate NY and Oregon to Indonesia, Thailand, Australia, the Caucasus and Western Europe, and then providing all like-minded jihadis with enough information to make the Anarchist's Cookbook look more like The Joy of Cooking, I don't think the leadership needs to order anything but the highest profile attacks necessary to steer the overall global situation to their advantage. And in between these more spectacular attacks, the jihadi sprouts have more than enough motivation, support, information and rich targets to keep the authorities busy, acting as force multipliers for the parent organization, and fulfilling Usama's whimsical prophesy about sending a few guys to the furthest point the globe to wave a flag and send the Western leadership into an expensive conniption.

So it seems doubtful to me that Ayman and Usama somehow passed on the go-ahead for the relatively primitive attacks by the London bombers, but with the unquestioned the ability for the leadership to focus the worldwide Muslim anger onto the governments of Western Europe and the USA and then provide those angered with all the information they could ever need to make effective anti-personnel weapons on the cheap from a sporting goods store and hardware store, they've already done most of the heavy lifting. With the additional anger over the continued images in Iraq, the big two mostly need to sit back, make sure the AC's working in their high tech cave, and then fire up the video camera when the latest event falls their way, only further stirring the pot.

It seems pretty safe to say that one of the only places on Earth that didn't have a problem with jihadis was Iraq. Now we've got a self-fulfilling prophecy where we actually can take the fight to the terrorists in Iraq because Iraq is now "the Woodstock" of this generation of Muslim youth, as they said on Over There this week. We've turned a primarily secular society almost completely devoid of Islamic terrorism (outside of the US controlled no-fly zones where Ansar al-Islam had taken root), into one huge training camp (so attractive that message boards are telling young Muslims to stay away for the moment unless they have specialized skills because they're more a burden than a help) AND propaganda tool suitable for worldwide recruiting and inspiration.

How we fix this and refocus, I'm still not sure and I've not seen a ton of ideas. I see tons of suggestions about what not to do, some obvious, some potentially helpful, and all apparently ignored by the Vicious Bastards in DC, but I have yet to see anybody throw out a sort of all-encompassing plan that would at least get us started on the right road. It could be that as long as we're in Iraq, and making kissy face with the Saudi monarchy AND Sharon at the same time, not much of a plan is really possible.

But boy the blue bonnets sure are pretty in Central Texas in the spring, aren't they?