All terrorism is local

Much of the reactionary blog community seems to have followed the example of the Dear Leader and taken August off. So in the absence of the daily barrage of lunacy on Opinionjournal.com, one has to go the Wall Street Journal editorials to see the underlying mentality at work. We've noted before two recurring themes of much of the reactionary commentary on terrorism: the Epiphany Theme and the SPECTRE theme.

The first compares a terrorist event to the first sighting of the Messiah, in its ability to open our eyes to things we just hadn't seen before. The second views terrorist events as being coordinated from a stylish Bauhaus style bunker, in which various aspiring Dr. Evils (Kim Jong Il, Osama, Saddam, Yassir Arafat, and Jacques Chirac) allocate terrorist resources in reaction to strategic moves by the US. The two themes collide in today's WSJ editorial on the Bombay atrocity:

...All of this [Bombay] once again shows how the fight against terrorism is global. That's a lesson that doesn't yet seem to have fully hit home in India, judging from New Delhi's recent rejection of a U.S. request to send 15,000 troops to help restore order and combat terrorism in Iraq...
...The U.S. has recognized that India has its own terror problem, and has pressured Pakistan to stop winking at terrorists in Kashmir...We think India could have helped build even closer U.S. ties had it decided to send troops to Iraq. The U.S. has driven a wedge into the center of Muslim terrorism with its occupation of Iraq, and it is looking to see who its friends really are.

As usual one gasps at the implicit and explicit "logic" here: India is not serious about fighting terrorism because it wouldn't send troops to Iraq, but thanks to the bombing, maybe it now will get serious; Iraq is the center of Muslim terrorism -- can they name a single Islamic terrorist event outside Iraq attributable to Iraqis? And since even the editorial seems to agree that the Indian terrorism problem is concentrated in Kashmir, how exactly does invading Iraq amelioriate that problem? Unless they mean the preposterous flypaper theory, within which global terrorist resources are allocated by SPECTRE into the Iraq trap laid for them by the US.

Ever get the feeling that US foreign policy is being run by people who think Bombay is a brand of gin and Kashmir is a Led Zeppelin song?