When your purpose is to stir up a war, it doesn't particularly matter whom you target. To make any kind of sense of this, you have to put yourself into a whole different way of thinking. It's not a matter of being illogical, but the premises underlying the activities are radically different from the ones that normally obtain.

Sometimes this kind of thing has been expressed in terms of two people who are trying to play a game, but one is playing chess and the other is playing poker. What kind of game is Al Qaida playing? I couldn't say, but it's very clearly one in which sacrificing pieces is part of the strategy. Sometimes very big pieces, whole countries even.