The Republicans are pushing fear again. - That process started WW I, too.

Kevin Drum points out that all we are hearing from the media is "al Qaeda this" and "al Qaeda that." But what they don't say is that the various supposed branches of al Qaeda are not really connected. Al Qaeda as headed by Osama bin Laden does not contribute to or direct the actions of AQI (al Qaeda in Iraq.) This is all part of the Myth of AQI.

When Gen. Petreaus says that Americans are fighting al Qaeda, he means the organization in Iraq which was created by the jordanian Zarqawi, not the al Qaeda which is headed by Osama bin Laden.

It is to the advantage of the Whahabi extremists like Osama bin Laden to make themselves appear more effective than they really are. The AQI have a similar motivation to appear more threatening, so they have adopted the name (but not the direction) of al Qaeda.

This all gives George Bush and the Republican Party an excuse to make the Islamic terrorist threat both much larger than it really is, and make it appear to be a real threat to the existence of America.

It ain't.

The Wahhabi terrorist threat is little more than the threat presented by the Anarchists early in the twentieth century. The Anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated The American President William McKinley. The anarchist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Either would have been happy to crash a hijacked airliner into their target, but airliners did not exist in those day. The overreaction of the Austrians against their Serbians enemies that set off WW I was a problem if the command structure of the Austro-Hungarian government, not the direct result of the assassination of the Archduke.

What is the difference?

Technology.

The idiot assassins who attacked America on September 11, 2001 had technology that the earlier Anarchists couldn't touch. Ten men took down the World Trade Center by merely high-jacking two airliners. (Who remembers the Pentagon? - less than the Murragh Building in Oklahoma City.)

So the new terrorists/Anarchists are more dangerous than the Anarchists, right?

That depends. They can each kill a few more people in each attack, but they have no more power to change American society than Leon Czolgosz or Gavrilo Princip did.

Timothy McVeigh killed a lot more people in Oklahoma City (168) than either Czolgosz or Princip dit, with no more reason and no more danger to American society. Same motivation, but an advance in technology. That's all.

But Gavrilo Princip started World War I, right? No, that was the responsibility of the military high command and the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (who tried to use the assassination as an excuse to solve their Serbian problem) and Kaiser Wilhelm who promised the Austro-Hungarian Emperor that he would back them up if the Russians mobilized to support their Serbian fellow Slavs.

Emperor Franz Ferdinand had a lot more reason to feel threatened by the radical Serbians than George W. Bush had to feel threatened by the Iraqis, but the idiotic reaction to start a war was very similar.

The military overreaction by Bush and the Republican Party is creating a lot more enemies than it is suppressing.