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This is an important article in spite of what I see are some significant deficiencies.Peter's rambles over too much territory here. His writing style in discussing terror bombers is much to florid and he is more impressed with the phenomenon than I am. His is correct about the deep seated irrationality of the armed Islamacist movement. Intellectuals (even if their ideology is religious fanaticism) with guns are always a volatile and generally dangerous mix as they aspire to be a coercive elite. In the case of the fanatics we are currently fighting I think the real danger is in some sort WMD attack not in suicide bombers. The big reason that there have been no major Islamic terror attacks in the US since 9-11 is that AQ and friends are trying to mount something really big within the US. The mechanism may be, probably will be asymmetric but the goal will be a mass casualty event to put 9-11 in the shade. After all how many years and how much effort went into the 1993 attempt on the WTC and then on 9-11. Peter's no where mentions the danger to the US from an AQ-Iranian nuclear axis. I do not believe that AQ being almost entirely Sunni in anyway deters practical collaboration between these two deeply hostile forces against the US. The question is how to get the WMD's in place to carry off (if possible) simultaneous mass casualty attacks maybe using both some sort of radiation weapon and chemical agents.

Where Peter's gets it right is his diagnosis of why western media and intellectual elites side with the terrorists and what a strategic problem that can be for the US and the massive military problem China will be for the US in the future. The way I see things is the US ids facing first a nuclear armed terrorist state (Iran) that has fair geographic depth and a pretty large population and a national decision making style that we have few clues as to how it actually functions. Beyond Iran looms a period of confrontation with a China that is not interested in only making money and expanding an export driven economy as the Japanese were before their bubble deflated. The Chinese are determined at the highest levels of their regime to try and become if not more powerful than the US at least as powerful politically and militarily as well as economically. Their ambitions remind one German under Wilhelm II and the restless ambitions of the Kaiser Reich to achieve its 'place in the sun'.

The 21st Century is shaping up to be possibly as stress filled as the 20th.