The best present-day Vietnam War analogy is not Iraq, although Iraq is part of it. But so is Chechnya, Somalia, Indonesia.

Al-Qaida's ability to spin battlefield defeats into vic tories using psychological tactics calls forth echoes of the North Vietnamese, who lost battles galore, but made them look like wins.

The tactics present new challenges in a terrorism war gone dangerously off track and now at risk of escalation. The most dangerous possibility here is a pan-terrorist alliance between the mostly Sunni al-Qaida and the Shiite Hezbollah. That makes solving the Arab-Israeli dispute more urgent than ever.

While the 9/11 commission staff found no evidence of collaborative ties between al-Qaida and Iraq, Hezbollah was another matter, with "far greater potential for collaboration" than previously supposed, the staff wrote.

Ties include actual training of a small number of al-Qaida operatives and a possible joint role in the 1996 Khobar towers attack that killed 19 Americans.

This is bad news. Hezbollah is still the world's most formidable terrorist foe - not the least because it's able to operate on a political plane and even form alliances with Syria and Iran.

Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden's terrorist network is down but not out, operating on a shoestring but spun out to graduate teaching assistants around the world, some with master's degrees earned in Bosnia and Chechnya.

As the kidnappings and ghoulish beheadings in Saudi Arabia and Iraq demonstrate, the grad students don't always exhibit the greatest sophistication and craft. But they are functioning.

The beheadings have proven surprisingly effective even as they reveal the lack of humanity and absence of true religiosity of the executioners. They're intended to scare away allies, sap U.S. morale and expose America's vulnerabilities to a world audience via the Internet and willing television outlets. The practitioners of these atrocities are dead wrong, yet they learned the art of violence in wars America begot.

In attacking Iraq, President George W. Bush was not the first president to violate international custom and trample on the principle of sovereignty just because "he could."

President Bill Clinton's forays into the Balkans were equally dubious, albeit with a less obvious downside.

But look at what Bosnia has reaped - a territory that's still not a functioning nation, a region still brewing war and a new generation of al-Qaida grad students. The original two 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, became constant companions fighting Croats and Serbs in Bosnia. The founder of Saudi Arabia's latest terrorism franchise, Abdulaziz al-Moqrin, apparently gunned down within hours of his dispatch of U.S. hostage Paul Johnson, came home wounded from the Bosnian war.

Terrorism is nothing more or less than a twisted attempt to scare by picking on the most innocent and vulnerable. That's why bin Laden or his surviving henchmen must be denied the psychological advantage.

As the 9/11 commission has reminded us, bin Laden pressed his attack on America for strategic reasons beyond the obvious bloodying of Americans. He wanted to reap "a recruiting and fund-raising bonanza," and he did. While the money is down, so are the expenses - and al-Qaida now farms out almost all the work to its hidden ranks of grad students.

Franklin Lavin, the U.S. ambassador to Singapore - a U.S.-friendly Asian country - knows something about this. He got to the island state in 2001, not long before the government busted up a post-9/11 al-Qaida plot intended to incinerate several foreign embassies and possibly a bunch of U.S. sailors.

Loose lips sank that plot, but Lavin said its lesson is sobering - that the hard part isn't acquiring the bomb ingredients. (The ammonium nitrate fertilizer is widely used on Singapore's golf courses and could be acquired by the ton with a phone call, said Lavin.) "The harder part," Lavin, 46, a former international banker and Republican donor from Canton said in an interview Tuesday, before speaking to the Cleveland Council on World Affairs, is "how to train people," how to move them around and scale the attack properly.

Lavin thinks America is winning the terrorism war, and notes we no longer underestimate al-Qaida and its potential for lethality.

Yet are we overestimating now, unwittingly recruiting by our willingness to use force that invites asymmetric responses? Are we setting up the next generation of terrorist lethality - not truck bombs, not hijacked aircraft, but a radiological weapon wielded by a terrorist Ph.D. from Iraq - or Iran?

The absence of precision in how we talk about the terrorist threat - or quantify it, as in the inaccurate terrorism report that had to be rewritten - is an ominous sign.

Sullivan is The Plain Dealer's foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages.

© 2004 The Plain Dealer.

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