If attacking Iraq made things worse, what would it take to prosecute a war on terrorism successfully? A better strategy might employ the following elements: First, where they exist, we need to destroy terrorist headquarters and, when necessary, kill the killers. This strategy must be employed carefully, however: Wherever possible, we should avoid creating martyrs or enhancing our enemies' mobilization strategies. In many cases, it is likely to be more useful to persuade terrorists to talk to us than to kill them; and, second, when we select military targets, it is probably better to focus on operatives rather than inspirational leaders such as bin Laden or Sheik Yassin. While the world is definitely better off without such evil men, their deaths could inspire their followers to kill many more innocent people.

Third, penetrating the various groups that are fighting us and turning them against one another is a critically important goal. The terrorists, Mao tells us, aim to create spiritual unity between the officers and their men and between themselves and the people. They also aim to destroy our alliances. Our goal must be the reverse: to create tensions between the leaders and their followers and among the various groups that compete for attention and funding. We also need to strengthen our alliances and make them robust enough to withstand the terrorists' attempts to split us from our allies. The al-Qaida movement has been cleverly exploiting tensions over the Iraq war to split us from our allies.

Related to this, fourth, we need to strengthen intelligence and law enforcement networks both within and among governments. This requires maintaining existing alliances and creating new ones -- sometimes with states that don't always live up to our expectations in all matters. Once we understand that terrorism is the most significant threat we face today, it becomes easier to order our preferences and demands.

Fifth, we need to strengthen weak states, which are, as the Bush administration itself pointed out in its national security strategy, terrorist breeding grounds. Sixth, we must avoid feeding into the distressingly widespread perception that the United States is out to humiliate the Islamic world. We need always to be mindful of Mao's explanation that terrorists are fish swimming in a sea of ordinary people, whose occasional support the terrorists' may require. We are competing with the terrorists for the hearts and minds of the ordinary people who make up that sea. Finally, we need to minimize the risk that terrorists or their sponsors will acquire powerful weapons, especially weapons of mass destruction.

In addition to the purported links between al-Qaida and Saddam, the Bush administration claimed that the war was necessary because of Iraq's weapons-of-mass destruction program. Even granting the Bush administration its arguments, there were still serious problems with their case for invasion. The notion that Saddam might try to cultivate links with al-Qaida might have been a plausible theory, though no intelligence has been revealed to support it. And yet it seemed more than a bit far-fetched to envisage Saddam giving over weapons of mass destruction to an Islamist group with ideological links to local Salafists who aimed to destroy his regime. Indeed, attacking Iraq, without protecting its borders, has made it more likely that WMD components and expertise would end up in the hands of terrorists. Capt. J. Ryan Cutchin, the leader of the inspection team known as MET Bravo, told the New York Times that his team often arrived at sites identified as housing WMD after looters had stolen everything of value. We may never know what the looters -- or Baathist elements pretending to be looters -- managed to ferret away, he said. Once scientists know how to grow and disseminate biological agents effectively, new stockpiles can be rapidly rebuilt. Perhaps the most frightening prospect would be if some of Saddam's weaponeers provided their expertise to our terrorist enemies.

The war in Iraq has split the allies, not the terrorists. It has turned Iraq into a Mecca for international terrorists, and mobilized local Shiite and Salafi jihadist groups that had previously posed a minimal threat. It has facilitated connections between terrorists and those with formal military experience in Saddam's army, the lethal nightmare that the invasion was supposed to have thwarted. Antipathy toward the United States, not only in Iraq and throughout the entire Islamic world, but in Europe as well, has become a dangerous trend exploited by terrorists. Even as we tout our successes in rounding up al-Qaida terrorists, the broader movement inspired by bin Laden and ignited by the invasion of Iraq is recruiting new nihilist minions throughout the world. The war in Iraq has not only been a distraction from the war on terrorism; it has strengthened our enemies in ways that continue to surprise and horrify us. Where will we be surprised next?

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