According to data gathered by our experts, from December 2002, three months before the US invasion of Iraq, al Qaeda began issuing a stream of fatwas designating its main operating theatres in Europe. Spain was on the list, but not the first.
1. Turkey was first. Islamic fundamentalists were constrained to recover the honor and glory of the Ottoman caliphates which were trampled by Christian forces in 1917 in the last days of World War I.
2. Spain followed. There, al Qaeda set Muslims the goal of recovering their lost kingdom in Andalusia.
3. Italy and its capital were third. Muslim fundamentalists view Rome as a world center of heresy because of the Vatican and the Pope.
4. Vienna came next because the advancing Muslim armies were defeated there in 1683 before they could engulf the heart of Europe.

On the same day as the Madrid trains were blown up, the Americans launched Operation Mountain Storm against “high value” al Qaeda and Taliban targets in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It does not escape observers that while al Qaeda is capable of assaults on five fronts at least – Iraq, Turkey, Spain Kashmir and Saudi Arabia, the US global offensive against terror is limited to a single front, which too is far from the fundamentalists’ most active current arena.

As we now know, Bush is endorsing a Constitutional amendment which could change the country forever. As one Republican lawyer told Andrew Sullivan, "[With] one amendment the religious right could wipe out access to birth control, abortion, and even non-procreative sex (as Senator Santorum so eagerly wants to do). This debate isn't only about federalism, it's about the reversal of two hundred years of liberal democracy that respects individuals." Or, as Sullivan put it, "Memo to straights: you're next."

And as Bob Woodward wrote in Bush at War: "The President was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God's Master Plan," wherein Bush promised, in the President's own words, "to export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great country and rid the world of evil."