There's such a thing as being too clever by half. But I agree Bobert -"demented", meaning mindless.

Maybe it was the same guy who suggested Bush started going on about "a crusade". Bin Laden's scriptwriter inside the White House.

Chopping off heads doesn't work when you're Hercules facing the Hydra, and every time you cut off a head you get several more. Something much more imaginative is needed.

Part of the background here, once again, seems to be the legacy of the cold-war encouragement of anti-left movements of one sort or another, which have turned out to be the seed-bed of this kind of terrorism. The attitude "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" lies at the root of an enormous amount of the things that have gone wrong in the world over the years, and it is active and still poisoning the future.