The Bush administration has fought the "war on terror" as a series of Jerry Springers, one lunatic leap of logic after another based on unreliable sources, linking up enemies that had little to do with each other. The White House's failure to understand counterinsurgency in Iraq is, writ large, its failure to understand the radical Muslim enemy as a whole. The president has used Al Qaeda to gin up the threat from Iraq, just as he is now conflating Hizbullah and Hamas with Al Qaeda as "terrorists" of the same ilk. Actually these groups had little connection to one another—or at least they didn't until America decided to make itself their common enemy. Al Qaeda was always, in truth, the only "terrorist group of global reach" in the world—which is how Bush accurately defined things back in that long-ago fall of 2001. Both Hizbullah and Hamas had publicly disavowed any interest in backing Osama bin Laden's goals. Al Qaeda was Sunni, Hizbullah is Shiite. Even within the Muslim world these groups had scant support, although Hamas and Hizbullah had a lot more than Al Qaeda did because they were providing social services in Lebanon and Gaza.

I've said over and over that the "they jes hate us!" explanation of terrorism indicates a disastrously shallow grasp of the problem. Applying the term "terrorism" to any damn bad thing in the world (thinking of a recent post by ScottEvil describing counterfeiting as "economic terrorism", for example) only blurs our focus and undermines our ability to think clearly about the challenge.

Bush's clueless perception of every problem as "terrorism" and his expansive attempts to weave every miscreant into a global network of terrorists also has the unfortunate side effect that the progress of Bush's "war on terror" is now measured by pretty much the total ratio of peace to conflict in the world. Bush declared that the civil war in Iraq is somehow the "frontline in the war on terror", and now yet another in the endless sequence of disputes between Israel and its neighbors opens up another "front" on the GWOT. Rockets from Lebanon fired into Israel is hardly a new development, but now it's been woven into Bush's epic struggle and it is, by Bush's definition, now our problem.

Common sense says that divide-and-conquer should be a powerful strategy against a geographically-dispersed and loosely-organized enemy. But yet Bush seems to be pursuing a strategy of uniting all these once-separate and often-uncooperative groups into a common cause against the US. How long can he claim there's a connection between these disconnected groups before they take the hint and form alliances?