An unprecedented veil of secrecy has been cast over the current US military deployments in the Middle East.

They're not telling George.

I've actually never subscribed to the popular liberal/left conceit of Dubya-as-stupid, and let's hope for everyone I'm right. Because if he, or his handlers--er, administration--actually believe the rhetoric they've been trotting out in recent days about the war that may be underway as you read this, the world is in big, big trouble.

There's no question that the United States, and the rest of the world, need to take forceful steps--not just to bring Sept. 11's perpetrators to justice, but to minimize the chances that such a thing, or worse, can ever occur again. And although involving the military might or might not be the best way to do that, the approach our country is apparently taking is just about guaranteed to be futile at best, and a prescription for World War III at worst.

For starters, "war"--even "a new kind of war"--is the wrong analogy for what's needed. It's like declaring war on the Crips writ large: "war" on a collection of self-affiliated, criminally inclined individuals, living anywhere and everywhere, bound by shared ideology and worldview. There seems to be this assumption that the problem is Osama bin Laden and his supporters, all of whom are holed up in a ranch somewhere in Afghanistan, waiting for the bombers to appear.

This, of course, is nonsense. Whoever launched Sept. 11's attacks was smart enough to scatter to the four winds before it was launched. And Osama bin Laden, it cannot be stated often enough, is a tiny part of the problem, magnified by the seeming American need to put a single name on the enemy (Saddam, Noriega, Qaddafi, Fidel) and by the cachet bin Laden will get from being targeted, and possibly martyred, by the Americans.

But he's not a major strategist among the world's radical conservative Sunni Moslems; his role has been relatively minor, even as financier. (His much-vaunted riches have been frozen for years.) He simply acts, as do a number of other individuals, as a facilitator among a broad network of violent fringe Sunni groups. Removing him doesn't begin to solve the problem.

One particularly alarming--and seemingly inevitable--aspect of the US response to last week's attacks is Congress' desire to lift the ban on the CIA's hiring of the, er, criminal element in its covert activities. It's not just that Osama bin Laden got his training that way. There are perhaps 100,000 fringe radical Sunnis in the world (out of 1.2 billion Moslems; a few dozen probably carried out the attacks). Many of them were brought together, trained, and armed by the CIA and Saudi and Pakistani intelligence in the mid to late '80s in Afghanistan, with the twin goals of fighting the Soviets and causing headaches for the rival Shiite regime in neighboring Iran. This is the granddaddy of all "blowback"--the term for a covert operation that has unforeseen, disastrous consequences--and nobody seems to have learned the lesson.

The CIA would not have retained these folks if it felt they were inclined to knee-jerk, inherently anti-Western and anti-Christian violence. They weren't, and unlike the common media portrayal this week, they aren't today, either. In their view, they are not launching an all-out war of Islam against the West--they are responding to a war they perceive the West, vaguely led by the US, is waging against Islam. The tendency on the left is to ascribe all of it to America's foreign policy sins, but the list of grievances is much broader, and includes wars where Muslims have borne the worst violence in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Aceh (Indonesia), Kashmir (India), Azerbaijan, and, of course, Iran (when the West supported Iraq in the '80s), Iraq (including sanctions that have killed over a million civilians), and Palestine; US and Western support for brutal dictatorships in Iran (the Shah), Chad, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Algeria; and perceived desecration of Islamic holy sites by the US military during its Gulf War deployment. And, of course, widespread, crushing poverty.

Any of the conflict sites make fertile recruiting ground among the young, poor, devout, and despairing; if the US takes out more innocent civilians, as many are now clamoring for, it will simply make recruiting that much easier. Think of how easy recruiting is for our armed forces this week, and multiply it by ten. And the US has, in one respect, already announced this policy, by demanding that Pakistan cut off supply lines for food and other necessities that are keeping alive many Afghan civilians and refugees who were already victimized by the Taliban.

If that demand is honored, the death toll that could directly result is incalculable, and it will be immediately added to the list.

This is the essence of war: wanting vengeance, and claiming that the other side started it. But even if, as the US is now claiming, these attacks were supported by nation-states, it should be evident to anybody that they did not need the support of nation-states. What, then, will the War on Terrorism become? A worldwide, house-to-house search for those who would kill us, with the resulting loss of the very freedoms we're claiming to defend? Permanently? Because there's no land to seize, no government to topple, no surrender that will bring closure. Once begun, it can never end except unilaterally. And it cannot be won--only lost, because we haven't even begun to consider biological, chemical, or nuclear terrorism, and it only takes one to succeed.

Terrorism's strongest asset is the strength of motivation of its practitioners. It's best battled by taking away that motivation: the poverty, the dictatorships, the violence. It's best fanned by creating more martyrs.

The United States can't be that stupid. Can it?