Today’s New York Times:

“The great problem is that Al Qaeda has moved far beyond being a terrorist organization to being almost a state of mind,”

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/11/world/europe/11qaeda.html?hp&ex=1155355200&en=eeec0f91cd71e891&ei=5094&partner=homepage

I wrote about this in my book Neurosphere:

“The war on terrorism as proclaimed by President Bush is the incipient form of conflict within a neurosphere, not across borders but within the skin of a single global entity. The war will not be confined to Afghanistan, or Iraq, or any small collection of countries. The Al Qaeda network is said to operate within more than 60 countries. It is a stunning fact that they operated most successfully in Florida, a state it will be hard for Mr. Bush to declare war upon. And it seems increasingly clear, after a year of war, that the supply of fresh recruits to the terrorist cause continues to grow.”

Sadly, nothing has changed in the ensuing four years, certainly not in the Bush Administration’s stupid inability to fight this war as anything different from any other game of cowboys and Indians. It is not even about more sophisticated intelligence capabilities to “find” the bad guys. The enemy is truly within – within the borders of the U.K., probably still within the U.S. Bush’s svengali Karl Rove keeps him on a message that makes sense to 51% of the population. Cheney and Rumsfeld keep a defense strategy going that does enriches Halliburton and other contractors and keeps political support coming in from that sector.

What’s still missing is a strategy from the opposition that goes beyond “out of Iraq”, something that reaches not only the strains of thought within fundamentalist Islam, but also the strains of thought within Christian fundamentalism that keep support for Bush’s “us or them” strategy going. A strategy that understands how group minds grow and develop and, so far, fail to truly evolve.