Al-Shabaab Twitter avatar.

Just in time for tonight's Presidential debate on foreign policy, Al-Shabaab, a Somali group which reportedly merged with al Qaeda in early 2012 has issued series of apparently threatening tweets on its Twitter account.

The posts were directed at the British government and referenced the "extradition and trial of Sheikh Abu Hamza Al-Misri." Al-Misri is a one-armed cleric who will soon be extradited from the U.S. to Great Britain. He will face charges connected to a hostage incident that occurred in Yemen in 1998 as well as charges related to fomenting jihad abroad and attempting to create a jihadi training camp in Oregon in 2001.

After referencing Al-Misri's pending extradition, Al-Shabaab tweeted the following declarations:

We remind the British government that we're a nation that doesn't tolerate oppression & their actions will be repaid in retaliatory measure

— HSM Press Office (@HSMPress) October 22, 2012

Britainwill pay the heftiest price for its brazen role in the war against Islam and endless brutality against innocent Muslims. — HSM Press Office (@HSMPress) October 22, 2012

The nightmare that surreptitiously looms on British shores is bound to eclipse the horrors of 7/7 and 21/7 combined insha –allaah. — HSM Press Office (@HSMPress) October 22, 2012

The "horrors of 7/7 and 21/7" likely reference terrorist attacks that occurred in London on July 7 and July 21, 2005. The attacks killed more than 50 civilians and injured 700.

Al-Shabaab also addressed American Muslims:

It is time especially for the Muslims in the United States to make their stand, for such a level of vulnerability is painfully insufferable.

— HSM Press Office (@HSMPress) October 22, 2012

Al-Shabaab's Twitter bio does not mention al-Qaeda. It describes the group as "an Islamic movement that governs South & Cen. Somalia" and states it is also part of "the global struggle towards the revival of Islamic Khilaafa."

The Observer spoke with a few national security and terrorism experts, who posited that while remaining Al Qaeda forces may attempt to retaliate, the death of the terrorist leader may indeed have "cut the head off the snake."

"The world is indeed a better place without Osama bin Laden," said terrorism expert Dr. Hassan Abbas, who is a Bernard Schwartz fellow at the New York-based Asia Society. "There may be a brief upsurge in terrorist activity around the world as a reaction from members of Al Qaeda and its affiliates, but overall his death will prove demoralizing for the terrorist group."

Others said that bin Laden's death will likely have a decentralizing effect on remaining Al Qaeda forces and allies. Bin Laden was an extraordinarily charismatic leader who had the power to unite different factions, and he will be difficult--perhaps impossible--to replace. This may well lead to the demise of bin Laden's movement, but it may also motivate remaining forces to retaliate.

"I would expect that whoever replaces bin Laden will not really be able to be as effective a leader as bin Laden was," said Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institute. "I don't think that we can at all conclude that the demise of bin Laden means the end of Salafi or Al Qaeda activity around the world, including against the United States."

She added, "In fact, they will be very highly motivated to show that they aren't finished."

Dr. Felbab-Brown has noted, however, that the death of bin Laden may lead to a severance between Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which has been a goal for the U.S. Other experts aren't so sure that remaining Al Qaeda forces will have the capabilities to carry out the attacks.

"Al Qaeda has been trying for some time now to mount attacks," said Dr. Angel Rabasa, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. "They have, I think, an added motivation with bin Laden's killing, but I don't know that they have any enhanced capabilities to do that."

There was general agreement that the Obama administration should release the photos of bin Laden's body--to disprove conspiracy theorists, and to drive home the reality of the situation with the American public.

"At the end of the day, this is a moment of justice in the world," said Dr. Felbab-Brown. "And people should be allowed to express the catharsis."

Mr. Bergen's new book is a series of summary judgments of nearly every contested question surrounding the conflict. Some of those judgments are made on the basis of extensive documentation of the relevant facts; some balance grand conclusions on a very thin fulcrum of evidence; some are in significant tension with one another. Some lay waste to the shibboleths that time and events have shown to have been absurd (such as the links between Iraq and Al Qaeda). Some ratify the shibboleths of the present (such as the merger of Al Qaeda and the Taliban that policies premised on the existence of may be helping to bring about). All are proffered with supreme self-confidence.

The author, formerly a CNN correspondent, takes us on a rapid tour from the corridors of the Pentagon to the mountains of Tora Bora, from the torture chambers of the Egyptian security services to the ruins of the World Trade Center, from the streets of Fallujah to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Northwest Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is reputed to be hiding. He reminds us that Mr. Bush "raised Al-Qaeda to the status of the strategic, existential threat that the group craved to be, rather than the serious-enough problem that it in fact presented." He expresses astonishment that in the hunt for Mr. bin Laden, "its most important mission to date in the global war on terror," the United States turned to "a fractious bunch of AK-47 toting lawless bandits and tribal thugs, not bound by any recognized rules of warfare." He condemns the coercive interrogation in secret C.I.A. prisons adopted by Mr. Bush as "unnecessary and counterproductive."

As he puts it early in his account, we have allowed the war on terror to "warp US foreign policy and distort key American ideals about the rule of law, while his Administration's obsession with Iraq could lead the U.S. into fighting two wars in the Muslim world simultaneously, seeming to confirm one of bin Laden's key claims--that the West, led by America, was at war with Islam."

He reserves his greatest scorn for the war in Iraq. "What the Bush Administration did in Iraq is what bin Laden could not have hoped for in his wildest dreams: America invaded an oil-rich Muslim nation in the Middle East, the very type of imperial adventure that bin Laden had long predicted was the United States' long term goal in the region; the United States deposed the secular socialist Saddam, whom bin Laden had long despised; the war ignited Sunni and Shia fundamentalist fervor in Iraq; and it provoked a 'defensive' jihad that galvanized jihadi-minded Muslims around the world."

Mr. Bergen's telling of how the Bush administration pressed us into the war under false pretenses; bungled the occupation in ways that helped to fuel the murderous insurgency it became; and eventually managed, through a last-minute change in strategy, to pull Iraq from the brink of utter chaos, shows that Mr. Bergen is able to learn from events. In 2002, in a new afterword to his book Holy War, Inc., Mr. Bergen confidently declared that an attack on Saddam Hussein would be "a legitimate use of force under international law" and "prudent." 

This change in attitude, unremarked upon by Mr. Bergen in his new book, is important not merely as a matter of journalistic score keeping. It goes to the heart of the kind of journalist that Mr. Bergen is--a reliable bellwether for the views and attitudes of the national security establishment upon whose disclosures he relies. It is an establishment in which large strategic errors can survive unmolested by an onslaught of facts for years, or even decades, at a time. As for the central question posed by Clausewitz, about the kind of war we are fighting, Mr. Bergen will not budge from the very conclusion that his book has done a great deal to debunk.

By the time Mr. Bergen considers the question of "the end of the War on Terror," he has already explained to us that the likelihood of Al Qaeda acquiring "a true WMD--a nuclear device--is near zero for the foreseeable future." He has explained to us that  "Al-Qaeda no longer posed a national security threat to the American homeland" and instead represented a "second order threat similar to that posed by American domestic terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 when he bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995." He has shown that Al Qaeda has already sown "the seeds of their own long-term destruction," because of "crippling strategic weakness." And yet he declares that President Barack Obama understood that "recasting the GWOT [Global War on Terror] as the GPAT, the Global Police Action against Terrorists, would be both foolish and dangerous."

He then recites the story of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to blow up a Northwest airliner on Christmas Day 2009 with a plastic explosive hidden his underwear as proof that Al Qaeda still retained, as he puts it, "some ability to mount large-scale plots against the American homeland." This is an odd way of making his point, since the group calling itself "Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" does not cooperate with the group known as Al Qaeda headed by Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. And the plot (which failed when alert passengers wrestled the would-be bomber) is surely an instance of a "second order threat" rather than a "national security threat." Which is to say, precisely the kind of threat that has to be tracked down by police work, or stopped by security agents, and assuredly not the kind of threat that can be solved by shooting a missile at it.

Broadly speaking, we maintain armies with massive destructive capabilities to fight with other states--things that are, as New York Times reporter Timothy Weiner put it, "hard to kill but easy to find on a map." Individuals who want to cause mayhem are easy to kill but hard to find, and for them we use investigative methods that fall under the legal authority, and lie within the professional competence, of law enforcement. There can be some tinkering at the margins of these boundaries to meet exceptional cases (such as when we know terrorists are operating freely in places that lack the capability or means to enforce the law, as Al Qaeda in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan were doing prior to 2001), but any departure from the basic distinction outlined above is pure Clausewitzian error. The attacks of Sept. 11 may have been, as Mr. Bergen points out, military in their intent, motivation and scale. But they could have been averted only by proper intelligence sharing, or more vigilant border security. These facts point to the conclusion that the war on terror is not now and never was a real war. That a reporter as well informed as Peter Bergen can know all the reasons why it isn't and still insist otherwise points to the hard discursive boundary beyond which even a very intrepid writer keen to preserve his bona fides among the national security establishment is reluctant to stray. Beyond that boundary lies the truth, though it may take a further decade, and much blood and treasure wasted, before we acknowledge it.

Mr. Yang is a contributing editor of New York magazine.

Huge red Turkish flags hung from balconies where families drank tea; one woman had stretched a flag across the frame from which the glass of her window had been blown out by the bombs.

Gungoren is the kind of neighborhood I might take a foreigner to if I wanted to say: This is Turkey. And it's the kind of neighborhood that would lead anyone to wonder, as one man who'd lived there for 40 years wondered to me: "Why Gungoren?"

Istanbul is such a diverse and geographically enormous city that when news breaks of a terrorist bombing, the scramble to make sense of the act requires everyone to marshal all of their resources to find out exactly where it happened. Phone-calling, Googling, and then arguing over what exactly the neighborhood is.

Turks reflexively know whether any neighborhood sits on the European side or the Asian side; I imagine that's a genetic adaptation in this ancient border-sentinel city.

But then come the disagreements and confusions over borders: "It's out by the airport." "But is it near New Bosnia?" "Close, but not too close." "By the sea, or not by the sea?"

Last month's attack on the U.S. consulate, recently moved to a safer location up the Bosphorus, invited a similar response—you probably know someone who lives near the site, but that could be quite far away from you.

When the news identified the neighborhood of this latest attack as "Gungoren," there are a few things I knew immediately. The bombing wasn't in Sultanahmet, the Old City—the peninsula home of the Aya Sofya, the Blue Mosque, the Golden Horn, and, once upon a time, a thousand sex slaves locked up in a palace with a view. Everyone knows those neighborhoods.

It also can't be anywhere near Beyoglu, the old European city; the deluxe dance clubs of the Bosphorus; or the modern skyscrapers of Maslak. If someone were to bomb these Istanbul commons—as al Qaida did in 2003—where security cameras line the streets but trash cans do not, the news would take a more sensational tone than this one had. It was a whole different kind of bold.

This is partly why Sunday's attack was so chilling.

The terrorists targeted a pedestrian street in a middle-class neighborhood of no unique political or religious character. There are no Byzantine treasures or European corporate headquarters here. Just a civilian cross section of working, living, breathing Istanbul, shopping before bedtime.

Pedestrian boulevards are beloved in a hilly, trafficky city of large families and lonely migrants. In Istanbul, a pleasant, flat place to walk is also a communal sanctuary, especially in summer, when nighttime is a blissful reprieve from days spent cursing the sun.

The bomb exploded out of a garbage bin after 10 p.m. And killed 17 people and injured 150, thanks to a tactic the Iraq war has made cruelly familiar: set off one bomb, draw hundreds of concerned citizens to the scene, then set off the other. One witness caught an image of the second bomb exploding on his cell phone.

So, who wanted to bomb Gungoren? The bombs went off the night before the first day of a massive trial: Turkey's top prosecutor, with high-level support from ultra-secularists, had been trying to shut down the AKP, the Islamic conservative ruling party, and ban the prime minister and president from politics for five years. The highest court here can do that, even though the AKP won 47 percent of the vote in a democratic election. (The verdict came late this Wednesday: The so-called Islamist government will remain in power.)

Still, the timing of the bomb raised suspicions—but only that vague suspiciousness that always attends coincidence. Turkey doesn't have a strong history of radical Islam, and the AKP's supporters aren't radicals anyway.

"Who does everyone think did this?" I asked my young cab driver, who'd lived in Istanbul his whole life, on the way to Gungoren.

"Maybe Al Qaida?"

The international terrorist fraternity had been accused of the brash attack on the U.S. Consulate.

"Could be," he said.

"Not the PKK?"

On July 29, officials fingered the PKK, the militant Kurdish organization that has engaged in terrorist tactics for 30 years. The PKK doesn't have an obvious connection to the AKP trial, but it has been taking a beating from the Turkish military in recent weeks. So far, the PKK, who often take responsibility for their terrorist acts, have denied Gungoren, and offered their condolences to the victims.

"Could be," he replied again.

"This is the problem when something like this happens now," said one Turkish intellectual. "You think: ‘It could be the PKK, it could be DHKP/C, it could be Al Qaida, it could be the "Deep State"—it could be anyone!'"

The Deep State—or Ergenekon—is another story, and a distinctly Turkish one.

The word "Ergenekon" refers to a Central Asian myth about the origin of the Turkish race, and involves caves and wolves and possibly world domination, but what's important to know today is that "Ergenekon" was the name chosen by a murderous gang.

At least, in Turkish, they call it a "gang," but the word carries a different meaning than it does in English. This isn't the Crips and the Bloods. It also isn't the Italian Mafia, because Turkey's mafias run parking lots. Ergenekon, assuming it exists, is the most powerful gang of all, the übergang.

Turks have been living in a state of legitimized paranoia since January, when over 80 members of the Ergenekon gang were arrested for trying to create an atmosphere of instability that would result in a coup against the ruling religious government. The accused make up the ultranationalist upper crust—retired military generals, lawyers, academics, journalists, a university president, the head of PR for a church.

The 2,500-page indictment against Ergenekon, which was released this past weekend, accuses the gang of engaging in demonic terrorist tactics: bomb prominent targets, blame left-wing or minority groups, and stir up chaos until the army is forced to step in, shut down the government and wipe the slate clean. That's why subscribers to this theory might think Ergenekon had a hand in Gungoren: maximum chaos, minimal sense.

That's not as far-fetched as it sounds. Every morning, Turks wake up to terrifying headlines, newspapers filled with incredible details about Ergenekon. Among many other things, Ergenekon supposedly kept a to-do list including plans to kill Prime Minister Tayyip Erodgan and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk—and anyone else who threatens the sanctity of the secular nation or the tenets of Turkish nationalism.

One of the arrested was the lawyer, Kemal Kerincsiz, who prosecutes writers and other liberal folks for violating the infamous anti-free-speech law Article 301. Some link Ergenekon to the 2007 assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the newspaper Agos and the face of Istanbul's Armenian community.

Could one group possibly be responsible for all these acts? It strains credulity, and so some suspect that anti-secularist or religious elements have engineered the Ergenekon investigation. That secularist vs. Islamist war in Turkey you've been hearing about goes way beyond head scarves.

But the point is that Turks have been living for years with the idea that some secret force controls the fate of their nation. Here, well before the Ergenekon case, when participating in any sort of political conversation, it was common for Turks—all Turks, not conspiracy theorists—to mention the "Deep State" as a legitimate actor in the country's problems.

For now, some Turks will be satisfied by the authorities' prime suspects: PKK for Gungoren, Al Qaida for the U.S. consulate. But in this climate, the deeper Turkish response to the Gungoren tragedy and others will remain, Who the hell knows anymore?

"Terror is terror," said one Gungoren native, sitting on a bench at the bomb site, chain-smoking. And so living, working Istanbul learns to live with its dangerous enemies, whoever they are.

On the op-ed page, Daniel Kimmage files a piece from Baku, Azerbaijan, titled "Fight Terror With YouTube" about how Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda aren't keeping up in the Web 2.0 world.

As Mr Kimmage writes:

As unpleasant as the prospect of Al Qaeda "hits" might be, Mr. Kimmage sets aside any concerns that Osama bin Laden will ask you to be his Facebook friend anytime soon: "Mr. Zawahri solicited online questions last December, but his answers didn’t appear until early April. That’s eons in Web time.... Even if security concerns dictated the delay, as Mr. Zawahri claimed, this is further evidence of the online obstacles facing the world’s most-wanted fugitives. Try to imagine Osama bin Laden managing his Facebook account, and you can see why full-scale social networking might not be Al Qaeda’s next frontier."

Over in the Style section, Abby Ellin has an article headlined "Coming Soon to YouTube: My Face-Lift," all about cosmetic surgeons recruiting via the video-sharing site. "Doctors—and patients—have taken to online video postings with gusto," writes Ms. Ellin. "Type in the word 'Botox' on YouTube and around 2,400 videos pop up. 'Breast augmentation' garners over 2,000; 'Lasik' around 2,000 videos."

Unlike Al Qaeda, the makers of these videos are ready for Facebook: "For Dave Gibson, 53, a New York actor, who had his Lasek surgery with Dr. Chynn in May, posting a video on Facebook and YouTube was a no-brainer. He even added his own blow-by-blow narration."

John McCain is in London to meet with Gordon Brown on Iraq (and hold a fund-raiser). Talking to reporters outside 10 Downing Street, he said he appreciates the contribution of British troops to the war and “that the British public opinion has been frustrated."

"Having just come from Iraq," he continues, "I can tell you that the situation has improved dramatically over the last year. Iraqi people are going about their normal lives, but the fact is Al Qaeda on the run, they are not defeated. They are not defeated." He goes on to discuss the measures that need to be taken to achieve stability.

This volume, a collection of essays and broadcasts by Ayman Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, does the Al Qaeda leaders no favors. Whatever their capacities as terrorists, Dr. Zawahiri tends toward the wordy and Mr. bin Laden is inordinately proud of his military exploits. As he refights Tora Bora for the nth time deploying the salt cellar and the humidor, we might be in some soporiferous midtown gentlemen’s club.

Raymond Ibrahim has assembled his material from odd corners of the press and the Internet. The writings, interviews and broadcasts by the two men date from about 1991 to the present. While it’s not wholly clear where all these bits and pieces come from, Mr. Ibrahim’s translations seem to be accurate.

He divides the writings into two sections, under the headings “Theology” and “Propaganda,” and he does so for a particular didactic purpose. For all of Al Qaeda’s claims that it’s merely resisting the aggression of the United States and its allies in the historical lands of Islam, Mr. bin Laden and Dr. Zawahiri also happen to want to subjugate the world.

Because there is no papacy or episcopate in Islam, any Tom, Dick or Ali can pronounce himself a jurisprudent and give law to the world. What’s striking about Al Qaeda theology is not, as some Americans think, that it’s based on the Koran or the anecdotes of the Prophet’s talk and conduct, known in Arabic as the sunna. What’s striking is that Al Qaeda rests on such a one-sided reading of them.

Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri have built their movement on a handful of Koranic verses—which are treated not as objects of contemplation but as talismans of battle—and above all on a single verse (9:5) that calls for unconditional war on Christians and Jews and, by analogy, any Muslim who rubs you up the wrong way. For centuries, this so-called Sword Verse has been deployed by extremists to abrogate the merciful and transcendental teaching of the Koran and to justify the murder and enslaving of nonbelievers.

Now, jihad, whatever it really means, has good authority in scripture. Not so the Al Qaeda-style of jihad, with its suicide bombings and indiscriminate slaughter. Suicide is a deadly sin in Islam but is here justified by a single dubious anecdote of the Prophet. The slaughter of innocents as a strategic goal appears to have no justification in any Islamic source at all. Still, I guess nobody with an interest in longevity is about to debate with Dr. Zawahiri these knotty theological points.

Both Dr. Zawahiri and Mr. Bin Laden subscribe to a doctrine known in Arabic as taqiya, which holds that it’s legal to lie and deceive for tactical purposes. When Mr. bin Laden claims only to seek the return of Palestinian lands and the withdrawal of Western armies from Arab soil, or offers a truce, is he sincere? Or are those mere tactics on the road to world domination?

Much Al Qaeda ideology is not even Muslim in origin. The mujahedin are a revolutionary vanguard whose lineage stretches back through the European terrorists of the 1970’s to the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins of the French Revolution. The contention that wicked Jews control the levers of the modern state goes back to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the anti-Dreyfusards.

Mr. Ibrahim compares The Al Qaeda Reader to Mein Kampf, and that is not a mere insult. In their brutality and candor, their fulminations against democracy and loose morals, their obsession with territory, their finicky racism and absolute disdain for the material needs of the public, these documents are a strange echo of Hitler’s writings from prison.

The odd thing is that there’s nothing particularly odd about Al Qaeda. Islamic history is littered with movements of violent jihad, which have thrown up all manner of governments and states, from the temporary (the Sudanese Mahdiya, the Taliban emirate) to the long-lived (the Saudi kingdom). Will these folks succeed in creating some paradise of gore in Iraq or the Pamirs? Or will they, as seems more likely, come under the control and patronage of some all-too-earthly Arab regime?

James Buchan is a former Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times.

—George Orwell

Last week, the ink spurted vigorously from the usual tentacles of conservative alarm after a memo leaked out of the House Armed Services Committee requesting that staffers refrain from using “colloquialisms such as ‘the war on terrorism’ and ‘the Long War,’” and avoid the best-known of these shorthand terms, “global war on terrorism.”

Staff director Erin Conatan explained in the memo that the objective was to “be as specific as possible” in the language of Congress’ upcoming defense authorization.

And for clarity’s sake, she supplied some examples of preferred usage—the “war in Iraq,” say, or “military operations in the Horn of Africa.” (Who knew?) She even prefaced her recommendations with the word “please.”

No matter. Those stalwart promoters of the Iraq War who allege its centrality to the West’s confrontation with militant Islam breezed right past the explicit context for Ms. Conatan’s advice: to ensure that defense-authorized funds actually, you know, go to the particular military operations for which Congress intends them.

They also overlooked the Bush Defense Department’s own effort to scuttle the “global war on terrorism” nomenclature in favor of the “global struggle against violent extremism”—which had been former Joint Chiefs head Richard Myers’ preferred term of art back in 2005. Even that once-fabled supreme martinet of the terror struggle, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, called for the term’s retirement shortly after his own late last year.

But such awkward contradictory evidence wasn’t going to get in the way of the main event. The miniature furor dragged on because it permitted Republican leaders and their media cheerleaders again to squint a bit, screw up their John Wayne swaggers and pretend that the last three years of military reversal—in the sphere of terrorist-fighting most particularly—hadn’t happened.

“The effort by Democrats to erase the words ‘global’ and ‘terror’ from our current war is an absurd effort to deny the fact that America is battling terror on a global scale,” thundered House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio in a typical statement.

Somehow, that misleading sentiment wasn’t exploitative enough for Delaware Representative Terry Everett, who announced nonsensically: “This is another way that the Democrats in Congress are trying to justify their position of not funding the troops by saying there is no war on terrorism. Perhaps the next step will be to deny that 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorist attack on 9/11.”

Fox News producers got in on the act, as only they can, tossing out a headline that read “House Democrats Offer Plan to Ban Use of ‘Global War on Terrorism,” elevating a style memo devoted largely to subject-heading fonts and punctuation usage into something like an Intelligence Directorate white paper.

But all this sound and fury isn’t drowning out the larger, dismal story of America’s engagement with the terrorist foe.

From 2004 to 2005, the number of terror incidents across the world nearly tripled; terrorism analyst Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc., and his research colleague Paul Cruickshank have just identified a sevenfold increase in jihadist terror attacks since the war began in 2003.

And a key reason for these dramatic spikes is the American misadventure in Iraq, which under the U.S. occupation is the central Middle Eastern recruiting ground for militant Islamists. The old Bush administration line on the Iraq War as a means of fighting the terrorists there so we don’t have to fight them here has turned quite squarely in on itself: We are fighting them there because we invited them there.

That’s just one of the dividends of calling the global war on terrorism what it is: its gauzy, expansive brief prevents such discomfiting truths from getting much traction in official debate.

Indeed, the “global war on terrorism” locution demands little from its users beyond incantation. It certainly hasn’t stood for much in the way of strategy, as the reversals in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown—to say nothing of the ground lost in other jihadist flashpoints such as Iran, Syria, Pakistan and Indonesia. The global crusade against terror is not so much a stirring call to arms as an article of faith—and in that sense it very well suits the country’s disastrous errand in Iraq, which always hinged on the mind-cure notion that the mere exercise of American military force could remake an entire region in America’s image.

And as it happens, last week also brought a vivid reminder of how tenacious that faith is in the upper reaches of the White House. The Army has declassified an inspector general’s report on the administration’s continued assertion that there was a strong link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda, in which the I.G. delicately referred to the promotion of that faulty intelligence as “inappropriate.”

But the day of the report’s release, Vice President Dick Cheney—Cardinal Richelieu for the terror-war faithful—took to the Rush Limbaugh show to insist otherwise.

“They were present before we invaded Iraq,” Mr. Cheney repeated in a litany of charges so divorced from consensual reality that it now almost reads like plainsong. For good measure, Mr. Cheney directed Mr. Limbaugh’s listeners to ponder the career of slain Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Muhammed al Zarqawi, who “took up residence there before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the Al Qaeda operations in Iraq before we even arrived on the scene.”

Intelligence reports have again stipulated that Mr. Cheney’s claim is off-base. While Zarqawi turned up in Iraq in 2002, apparently for surgery on a battle wound inflicted while he fought with the Taliban against the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, he appears to have had no formal affiliation with Al Qaeda until 2004, well after the invasion.

Yet such are the nominalist powers of this administration’s military faith: Stating a fact in the face of plain evidence to the contrary makes it so. And that ensures much more carnage and chaos on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan before any administration official can finally lay this mother of exhausted idioms to rest.

"Our defeat in Iraq would constitute a defeat in the war against terror and extremism and would make the world a much more dangerous place," said McCain.

But McCain's speech was a slap on the wrist to the Democrats compared with the lashing his chief Iraq advisor, Randy Scheunemann, offered last week.

Describing many of the Democratic candidates' post-combat troop withdrawal strategy -- leaving behind a reduced military presence or horizon force to fight al Qaeda, prevent genocide in Iraq and avoid the conflagration of a wider regional war - Scheunemann said, "It's ludicrous. Because the idea that we will be able to better prevent sectarian violence and fight al Qaeda better from Kuwait than how we are doing it now is laughable."

-- Jason Horowitz

Get it? He's from the Bronx and knows martial arts!

Again. He's a martial arts instructor and agreed to teach martial arts. Down three paragraphs.

UPDATE: The link above now directs to the newer version, which ran on B1 today. (The earlier, Bronx-centric one is missing).