And so it begins. The Riyadh bombings make it pretty clear that our battlefield successes and macho posturing have failed to stop either terrorism in general or al Qaeda in particular.

Many of us have been saying for months that the Bush administration's means have not suited the stated end of preventing future 9/11s. Even if one refuses to acknowledge that U.S. behavior might play some role in creating the conditions that spawn terrorism, it's far from obvious that the appropriate response is the serial invasion and occupation of Muslim countries and "rogue states." There has been much rhetoric about the war on terrorism "changing everything," requiring a new kind of warfare, etc., but it's instructive that our response has amounted to using the same old kind of warfare, only with better technology and fewer diplomatic constraints. Saddam was a side issue at best, an itch that the neocons and their boy George could not wait to scratch.

Conservative or maybe just American "thinking" on terrorism labors hard to conclude that our existing military establishment, perhaps with some Rumsfeldian reforms, is just what we need to deal with terrorism. It is a case of shaping our analysis of a threat to fit the means of fighting that we happen to have on hand, and happen to enjoy major political and economic constituencies. Despite the fact that it is the the multinational, stateless nature of terrorism that makes it a new kind of enemy, official counterterrorist thought places great emphasis on the role of national states in "sponsoring" terrorism, opening the door for the conclusion that conventional state-on-state military action is, as luck would have it, the exactly appropriate response to unconventional warfare.

As convenient as this conclusion has been for the Shrubbers and the Pentagon and lovers of the Big Stick everywhere, it is almost certainly wrong. State "sponsorship" often seems to amount to tolerating the presence of terrorist groups in a country, often by not looking as hard as they might, as opposed to actively funding, equipping, and directing them. (Iraq's "sponsorship" of Al Qaeda seems to have amounted to much much much less.) The sponsorship idea seems to derive from U.S. and Soviet activities in the Cold War, in which proxy freedom fighters set up by superpower intelligence agencies were common. Even back in those days the extent of outside control was often a myth, as in the case of the Afghan freedom fighters who grew up to be the Taliban and the Osamists.

Even if state sponsorship really is a significant factor, it is certainly not "necessary" for terrorism to exist. Terrorism is par excellence a weapon of the weak and the outlawed and the dispersed, of those who lack access to the power of a state or face an overwhelmingly superior force. This is not to justify terrorism at all, or to deny that blind ideological hatred animates it. The thing is, blind ideological hatred can be expressed in lots of ways. States are more likely to do it by, say, oppressing ethnic minorities rather than paying people to randomly blow up civilians in other countries.

It may be asked, as it was asked in the run-up to Iraq War II, what alternative we have to smacking around the bad guys we can see? I'm not sure in detail, but here's a start: The Taliban probably did need to be dealt with, but after that was over, we should have put a much more concerted effort into an international reconstruction of Afghanistan. Capitalizing on world outrage at 9/11, we should have concentrated our counterterrorism efforts on a much quieter policy of working with Arab and Muslim governments to root out terrorist organizations within their borders and to undertake serious democratic reforms.