World safer if we discard Bush demons

There are two words that should be consigned to the dustbin of the last decade. One is "terror", the other is "al Qaeda".

Neither has any meaning outside news media and so called intelligence agencies. People have not been terrorised, they are boarding aircraft as readily as 10 years ago.

And "al Qaeda" has had no visible existence since its camps were destroyed in Afghanistan, though you need to read references to it in newspapers closely to notice that.

The words obscure more than they illuminate. They are probably the reason we are no closer to comprehending and counteracting the suicidal murder missions of young Muslims than we were a decade ago.

Those who bequeathed these words to the world are not going to let the language be changed easily. When President Obama responded calmly to the attempt to blow up an airliner over the United States on Christmas Day former vice-president Richard Cheney accused him of pretending America is not at war.

US newspapers have been just as determined to keep their Bush-era demons and easy headlines. Obama has been criticised from left and right.

His response to the Christmas bomb attempt was "too long in coming, too cool in delivery and too removed from the extreme gravity of the plot", said the New York Daily News.

It found his depiction of the would-be bomber as an isolated extremist "remarkable and disturbing". The young Nigerian was nothing of the sort, said the News. "He operated, in fact, as an al Qaeda-recruited, al Qaeda-supplied, al Qaeda-directed foot soldier, as an enemy combatant and not as the criminal suspect of Obama's description."

Even liberal papers such as the Boston Globe have accused the President of "insensitivity" to these events. His defenders think it is the goodness in his heart that causes this "detachment", that his soul is a place of hope and progress and cannot contain the idea that "people hate us and want to murder us".

With defenders like that he doesn't need detractors. Obama is being merely accurate when he uses the language of crime rather than war and regards these killers and would-be killers as criminals rather than agents of a global conspiracy.

The criticism has spooked him, though. This week he reminded his voters that he said on his first day in office, "our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred, and we will do whatever it takes to defeat them ..."

Americans can tell he doesn't believe it. But that sort of rhetoric has been music to the ears of those in the Muslim world who want the rest of the world to take them seriously, to fear them if we will not respect their God.

Their religion, I think, performs the function for them that ethnic national identity does for other people. It defines who and what they are. They have much more need of respect for their religion than those who find their core identity in a culture or a state, and the problem is, frankly, Islam is hard for fair and liberal cultures to respect.

Muslims must know this and fiercely resent it. The few who feel fiercely enough to strike a blow against the West don't need a "network of violence and hatred". They just need to know where to go to find like-minded fellows with explosive and learn how to use it.

The Christmas bomber, a 23-year-old Nigerian, son of one of the country's leading bankers, went to Yemen after graduating from University College London. When he landed in Detroit with only his underpants damaged a group calling itself "al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" claimed responsibility on a website.

That has prompted Western security analysts and news agencies, ever wise after the event, to produce thousands of words on "al Qaeda's" new "branch" in Yemen. You can trawl through these words in vain for any first-hand testimony of an organisation with the sort of infrastructure and communications it would have to possess to be the underworld network these reports imply.

Thanks to the Bush years there may now be militants in several countries that style themselves al Qaeda. When one of them eludes Western airport security and attempts mass murder his motive does not elevate him from ordinary criminality.

Killers have a variety of odd motives, as the United States knows better than most places. It doesn't lose its sense of proportion over home-grown Wacos and Columbines.

It is the rest of the world that is inclined to wonder when an armed American goes feral, whether his anti-government rants reflects an insidious threat to the republic.

Americans know they are isolated extremists. And by treating them as such they are less likely to make them martyrs to every alienated loser looking for attention in lieu of respect.