Code yellow! No, orange! No, yellow! No, red! No, ....

So now we're supposed to be all a-flutter with concern and steeled with determination to Stamp Out Evil, letting no civil liberty bar our way! Al-Qaeda has threatened us! Again.

From AP for Thursday:

Al-Qaida's No. 2 embraced the London suicide bombings Thursday, warned Britain that more destruction lies ahead and promised tens of thousands of U.S. casualties in Iraq in a brazen assertion of the terror group's global reach. ...

In the tape, parts of which were broadcast by Al-Jazeera, [Ayman] al-Zawahri made no direct claim that al-Qaida carried out the July 7 attacks in the British capital, but sought instead to blame the carnage on Prime Minister Tony Blair's decision to deploy and keep troops in Iraq.

Okay, frankly I have to say I'm not impressed. These kinds of statements sound less like ominous threats than bombast trying to recapture past glory.

Others have noted that al-Qaeda never used to take credit for attacks until after it had been established by others that they were responsible. (Which is why even some politically well-informed people were unfamiliar with the group prior to 9/11.) Put another way, they let their work speak for itself.

But that was then. In more recent times - December, to be precise - al-Qaeda tried to reassert itself not by action but by identifying itself with the actions of another: Abu al-Zarqawi, who Osama bin Laden dubbed his "prince" in Iraq. At the time, I said this was a sign of bin Laden's

weakness, a sense that he is out of the loop, that he is in fact becoming "Osama bin Forgotten." He's not trying to keep the initiative, he's trying to regain it - and I don't mean the initiative against the US, I mean in leadership battles among violent Islamic fundamentalists.

And now this, a truly sad attempt to grab onto the coattails of someone else's "success."

Jeremy Bennie, a terrorism analyst for Jane's Defense Weekly, said al-Zawahri appeared to be trying to put an al-Qaida stamp on the July 7 attacks on the London transit system. ...

"He has tacitly taken responsibility by claiming al-Qaida is in control of the situation, even as most people aren't really sure bin Laden and al-Zawahri still are capable of organizing such an attack," Bennie said by telephone.

Exactly. Truth be told, I am as unimpressed with Zawahri's words as I am those of any other PR flack. I say al-Qaeda as an organization is a spent force.

That doesn't mean that the, if you will, idea of al-Qaeda, the concept of al-Qaeda, its existence as an ideology rather than an organization, is spent. It means that if we're going to worry about terrorist acts, we need to worry about the quiet ones, the ones interested in striking a blow rather than striking a pose, the ones whose hatred, whose anger, grows with each new humiliation, each new assault on their national and ethnic dignity, most immediately, each day the occupation of Iraq continues. As Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, author of a book on suicide bombings, Dying to Win, notes, the common thread uniting suicide bombers is not religion but pursuit of the strategic objective of compelling foreign forces to leave what they feel is their homeland.

And, as the Christian Science Monitor reported last month,

[t]wo new studies, one by the Saudi government and one by an Israeli think tank, which "painstakingly analyzed the backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to fight the United States" have found that most foreign fighters in Iraq were not terrorists before the Iraq war, but were "radicalized by the war itself."

Terrorists, suicide bombers, radical fighters, the whole lot - they are not born, they are not artificially generated by some kind of hyper-fundamentalist brainwashing, they don't result from a "hatred of our freedoms," they are created by a genuine sense of a wrong inflicted on them. Those are the people we need to be concerned about: People who feel, who have legitimate cause to feel, wronged, oppressed, attacked by the policies of such as us.

This, as I wrote in the weeks following 9/11, "doesn't mean excusing the terrorists who brought such ruin and pain to the streets of New York" - or Madrid, or London, or Sharm el-Sheik.

We are all responsible for what we do[, I said,] and their acts deserve nothing but condemnation: Understanding does not mean approving.

What it does mean is that our best targets for "attack" in this "extended campaign" are not the actual terrorists (who likely number no more than a few thousand) but the tens of thousands, the millions, among who they recruit and from who they draw their strength. Our best weapons are bread and butter, not bombs; our best tactic reconstruction, not retaliation; our best strategy justice, not jingoism. The best way to minimize terrorism is to ensure that the dispossessed have a genuine stake in the world and don't see us as grasping bullies - and the best way not to be seen as a grasping bully is not to be one.

It still seems like sound advice to me.