Terrorism

As the shock waves from yesterday's terrorist attacks in London -- which seem to be the work of jihadist militants -- reverberate across the Atlantic, a grim truth should become increasingly clear: one of the greatest terrorist threats to the United States emanates not from domestic sleeper cells or, as is popularly imagined, from the graduates of Middle Eastern madrassas, but from some of the citizens of its closest ally, Britain.

Suicide bombing. The massacre of school-children. The crashing of hijacked airliners into buildings. Can acts like these ever be justified by a legitimate cause?

The debate about how best to deter and defeat terrorism worldwide is at an early stage. But the debate about the legitimacy of terrorism is over. It is no longer acceptable to sneer that one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter.

Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City seems as if it happened less than 10 years ago, but its 10th anniversary, which happened a week ago, seems as if it didn't happen at all. And for practical purposes it didn't. Lots of stories made a bigger ripple in the week's zeitgeist -- some of them understandably (new pope chosen), some less so (on ''American Idol,'' Anwar's journey ends).

Is Al Qaeda capable of carrying out another Sept. 11 attack in the United States?

The Conference featured some of the world's leading experts on Al Qaeda, Islamic fundamentalism, and transnational terrorism. The meeting took place in the historic and beautiful Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill.

In his book The Fourth Power, Gary Hart demonstrates the linkage between a principled foreign policy and national security in the age of terror. He argues that when U.S. sanctions on the world stage are inconsistent with established democratic values, America is made more vulnerable. Stating that policies that erode America's image weaken our fight in the war of ideas, Hart argues there may be no more important arena going forward.

Selected reviews of What We Owe Iraq are featured below:

When you fly over the icy peaks of the Hindu Kush, which march in serried ranks toward the Himalayas, dividing Central Asia from the Indian subcontinent, you get a sense of the scale of the problem: Osama bin Laden may be hiding somewhere out there. Wherever he is, bin Laden continues to give substantial ideological direction to jihadist movements around the globe -- and so American forces are scouring the Hindu Kush to find him.

The last several days have been gruesome ones for Russia. On Aug. 24, two airliners crashed, apparently blown up by terrorists laden with explosives. On Tuesday, a female suicide bomber -- most likely one of the "black widows," women who have lost husbands, brothers or sons in Chechnya's war against Russia -- blew herself up at a Moscow subway station, killing nine bystanders.

What do Al Qaeda and General Motors have in common?

This may seem an odd, even perverse question when the Department of Homeland Security's orange alert has police in combat gear and with automatic weapons patrolling the perimeters of the complexes that house multinational corporations in New York City and New Jersey. Not to mention that Al Qaeda does not exactly exalt large corporations, which it sees as symbols of Western -- particularly U.S. -- power and carriers of values that threaten to spiritually disarm the Islamic world.