Actual title: Al Qaeda's Wish List.

An opinion column in which David Brooks, moderate conservative journalist, implies that Al Qaeda's "wish" is the installation of democratically elected center-left governments in the countries of Europe and (by extension) the United States. Will Brooks have to answer for the libels he writes here? Does he even "believe" them? Once again, the answer to these questions is no. His sole purpose is to encourage fear and rage in George Bush's opponents and fear and zealotry in George Bush's supporters, all while disseminating insinuatory anti-Kerry libel through a mainstream media organ.

1. "Some significant percentage of the Spanish electorate was mobilized after the massacre to shift the course of the campaign, throw out the old government and replace it with one whose policies are more to Al Qaeda's liking."

Al Qaeda's desired policy outcome being, apparently, the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. It does seem strange that Brooks has inside knowledge of such a radical shift in Al Qaeda's ideology and objectives. When they attacked the U.S. on 9/11, we didn't even have any troops in Iraq yet! (How could we then have appeased Al Qaeda by withdrawing them?)

2. "What is the Spanish word for appeasement?"

Not sure what Brooks is trying to suggest here.

3. "But I do know that reversing course in the wake of a terrorist attack is inexcusable. I don't care what the policy is. You do not give terrorists the chance to think that their methods work."

So now Brooks is suggesting--and this is really breath-taking--that Al Qaeda (assuming they are indeed found to have perpetrated the Spanish attacks) had the specific objective of causing a "reversal" in the "course" of the Spanish election, resulting in the installation of a Socialist government. Even more enormous is Brooks' suggestion that (even if this ludicrous notion were true) Spaniards who support a particular political party ought to feel accountable when their choice of party happens to coincide with that of Islamic terrorists!

4. "We can be pretty sure now that this will not be the last of the election-eve massacres."

Brooks: "Imagine the horror. It's November 2. Terrorists strike in the U.S. Kerry gets elected." Get it? We must unite to defeat the party that David Brooks believes the terrorists believe is most conducive to their terrorism!

5. "The terrorists sought this because they understand, even if many in Europe do not, that Iraq is a crucial battleground in the war on terror."

"The terrorists" understand "that Iraq is a crucial battleground in the war on terror"? Can Brooks really have been meaning something here?

6. "For Al Qaeda's mission is not about one country or another. It is existential."

Aren't most "missions," when it really comes down to it, "existential"?

7. "Now all European politicians will know that if they side with America on controversial security threats, and terrorists strike their nation, they might be blamed by their own voters."

Bad Spaniards, for letting those terrorists cause you to put such bad notions into the minds of all the impressionable European politicians!

8. "If a terrorist group attacked the U.S. three days before an election, does anyone doubt that the American electorate would rally behind the president or at least the most aggressively antiterror party?"

Does anyone doubt that that is what Brooks wants? Could this column be any more transparent a revelation of what most of us have known all along--that the GOP's only remaining strategy is to scare the living shit out of the American public with terror-bogeyman--and that this spectacle of the citizens of democratic Spain setting a bad example, of the non-desired electoral behavior, scares the crap out of them?

9. "Why hasn't Colin Powell spent the past few years crisscrossing Europe so that voters there would at least know the arguments for the liberation of Iraq, would at least have some accurate picture of Americans, rather than the crude cowboy stereotype propagated by the European media?"

As for the first part of the sentence: After all, where was he? I can just imagine Colin Powell on a kind of whistlestop tour through southern France, hollering about Iraqi liberation from a bunting-hung podium in the sleepy village squares.

The notion that the European media is responsible for the "crude cowboy stereotype" is too absurd to address.

10. "It will change how Al Qaeda thinks about the world."

A genuinely bizarre claim. Hasn't Al Qaeda already kind of pretty much decided how they "think about the world'? Don't they really not even "think about the world" that much? Don't they just kind of go out and blow shit up? Has contemporary Spanish politics replaced the Holy Koran as their guiding and inspiring text? Apparently.

But enough. One only hopes that history will look as kindly upon Brooks' writings as will nature upon his corpse.

Meanwhile, check out this wonderful "briefing" by Luke Mitchell in this month's Harper's magazine. This passage follows Mitchell's startling claim (startling to me, at least) that even a nuclear terror attack on the U.S. would not, as John Ashcroft likes to imagine, "destroy America":

Contrary to the administration's claims, the War on Terror is not "a challenge as formidable as any ever faced by our nation." It is not the Cold War, in which our enemy did in fact have the ability to destroy the Earth. Nor is it the Second World War (405,399 dead Americans), nor the First (116,516). It certainly is not the Civil War, still the deadliest conflict in American history (364,511 dead on the Union side, and an estimated 258,000 dead in the South) and one that specifically threatened to end the American experiment. It is not even a war in the "moral equivalent of war" sense of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Fighting it does not make us a better people. It is much closer to the War on Drugs--a comic-book name for a fantasy crusade. We can no more rid the world of terror than we can rid it of alienation. This may sound like a splitting of linguistic hairs, but we made a similar category error in Vietnam by calling a U.S. invasion a Vietnamese "civil war." That misidentification cost 58,200 American lives.

As opposed to terror, murder, at the hands of Al Qaeda or anyone else, is a very real threat. But it is not a supreme threat, and by calling it what it is we can recognize that it does not require the wholesale reorganization of the American way of life. The prevention of murder does not require the suspension of habeas corpus, nor does it call for the distribution of national identity cards, nor does it require the fingerprinting of Brazilian tourists. Preventing murder certainly does not require war, which of course is quite murderous in and of itself. What preventing murder requires is patient police work.

"Patient police work"--imagine that. Everyone knows that a few well-placed phone calls (and not a global war-crusade) could have prevented 9/11. Will the good politicians say it?

[An aside: It's clear now (if it wasn't before) that "the campaign" is underway, and that John Kerry and the Democrats are going to have to spend the next eight months being called terrorists--at first subtly, then not-so-subtly. Anyone have any ideas for what they should do?]