The great advantage the terrorists enjoy over the elephantine apparatus of representative democracy is the capability for the surprise attack: No warning given, no permission asked. Gotcha! You look around: Where'd he go? A certain impropriety attaches to comparisons such as those Don Rumsfeld engaged in recently between the war on terror and the war on fascism. The war on fascism concentrated our minds wonderfully. We knew not only who the enemy was, but where to find him and how to beat him. With the Islamofascists (a defensible if not technically accurate term), the matter is otherwise. The hard currency of the terrorist is uncertainty -- the kind once sowed by the Sioux and the Comanches. Uncertainty can cause your victims to shout at each other in the absence of singing, goose-stepping foes at whom to shout.

"Divide and conquer" is among the oldest and most effective slogans of warfare. Uncertain as may be the outlook for the war on terror -- in the skies and on the Iraqi front -- one thing is sure. Our adversaries have split us like a watermelon. It's not them we dislike and fear anymore, it's those other guys, with names and faces like our own.

We thought after 9/11 we were just plain old Americans. We're not. We're Bush-hating and Bush-backing Americans, "cut-and-run" and "stick-it-out" Americans; sad, disoriented Americans -- far from beaten, but doubtful what comes next. Who, five years ago, would have thunk it?