Maybe now there are Al Qaeda supporters in Baghdad, Doug - but there certainly weren't any under Saddam, and if there had been they'd have been targeting his regime.   But all the evidence is that most of the people fighting and blowing people up in Iraq are neither Al Qaeda nor Saddamites.

For retaliation ever to be justifiable it has to be against the right target. And it also has to be effective, in the sense that it actually weakens the organisation it is directed against. Lashing out at random because you have been hurt is no good in an individual, and it's no good in a nation.

The First World War started because of a vicious atrocity carried out by a terrorist organisation against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But the retaliation that was seen as justified proved disastrous for the whole world, and completely derailed the 20th Century and turned it into a time of horrors.

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Bin Laden wanting a global war? Depends on definitions. He has made it clear that what he hopes for, and expects, is that the Islamic World will come together in rejecting the type of world which is implicit in the "Western" system of government, economics and culture; and that this would involve a holy war against those things, and to extend his view of Islam ever more widely.

And he has also specifically said that war against Islamic forces will only serve to build support for them, and strengthen them.