Last week, American networks and newspapers boldly featured news of the coordinated terrorist attacks in Mombasa, Kenya. Almost simultaneously, a bomb killed 15 at the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel and an Israeli charter airliner was fired upon, unsuccessfully, in a ground-to-air missile attack.

The coverage was predictably sensational, particularly because of the implications of the missile attack and because even before seeing any evidence, American and Israeli authorities immediately pegged Al-Qaeda (along with two Somali-based Muslim extremist groups) as lead suspects in the attack.

Certainly, the notion that commercial planes can be shot out of the sky as easily as they can be blown up from within is an alarming and sobering one--particularly in parts of the world where, thanks to American taxpayers and the magic of the marketplace, American and Russian-made missiles and the equipment to fire them can be had cheaply and easily. But other, more subtle elements of the incident are at least as alarming. Indicative of what's at stake is the reaction to the attacks by Kenya's leading Islamic cleric, Sheikh Ali Shee, chairman of the Council of Imams. While unequivocally condemning the attack--and forcefully denying, in response to the allegations of a French intelligence newsletter, that he was aware of or helped in its planning--Sheikh Shee warned off Israeli and American tourists from coming to Kenya, saying, "There is an undeclared war between their countries and the Muslim world. It is not good for them to come until the [Palestinian] problem is solved." He also vowed to refuse any cooperation with Israeli or American investigators from Mossad or the FBI: "We will never cooperate with these people...They are criminals. This Bush is the worst leader ever. He is a man of war."

Kenya is a long way from either Palestine or Afghanistan, but such sentiments are common throughout the Islamic world--a world that stretches halfway around the globe, from Morocco to portions of the Philippines. Each day in that world, reminders of America's empire and what it means for Muslims abound. While it has faded from American headlines, Israel's occupation of Palestinian West Bank cities and routine arrests, house demolitions, curfews, shootings, and assassinations continue to escalate--as does the steady expansion of Israeli "settler" expropriations and vigilante actions against Palestinians. In Afghanistan over the weekend, the United States for the first time in five months used a B-52 bomber to try to protect American troops caught in the crossfire between the armies of two rival warlords near a base in the western part of the country.

The incident was a reminder of a number of things--that the US has set up permanent bases in Afghanistan, is still using force there, that its puppet government has virtually no authority outside the capital city of Kabul, and that American promises of democracy and an end to decades of warfare were an afterthought to an agenda that had little to do with the well-being of Afghans themselves. And each day, as United Nations inspectors continue their apparently trouble-free weapons inspections in Iraq, stories continue to pop up from across the region of America's preparations for an invasion of Iraq--an invasion that seemingly has nothing to do with any actual threat Iraq poses even to its neighbors, let alone the United States.

In such a context--with, as background, a massive gap in relative wealth and the steady invasion of Western brand names, pop culture, and social values--the idea that an undeclared war is afoot makes an awful lot of sense. Moreover, it's exactly the apocalyptic vision Osama bin Ladin himself was quoted as desiring when the 9/11 attacks were unleashed. Remember bin Laden? The whole post-9/11 War on Terror, including an invasion of Afghanistan, ousting of its government, indefinite imprisonment of soldiers defending their country against foreign invaders, imprisonment or deportation without charges of thousands of Muslim non-citizens within the United States, and passage of freedom-eroding bills like the USA PATRIOT Act and (most recently) the Homeland Security bill were all ostensibly about bringing bin Laden to justice and ensuring that such attacks wouldn't happen again.

Last month came word that bin Laden was still afoot, and both then and after the Kenya attacks, an astonishing thing happened in response: Nothing.

No vows of capture or bringing to justice, no renewed efforts at apprehension, no demands that the country "harboring" bin Laden (that phone call came from somewhere, right?) either hand him over or face the fate of the Taliban. It simply was, to all DC appearances, no big deal.

Hello? Is bin Laden a threat to the United States or not? If he is, then he and Al-Qaeda should be the country's top security concern, not Easter egg hunts in Iraq or Warlord mediation programs in Nangarhar. If groups like Al-Qaeda and the threat they pose are of no military consequence, and simply a matter for criminal investigators ala the FBI, then can we start, oh, I don't know, pulling our military out of a few dozen countries and chopping a few hundred billion out of their budget next year?

(Speaking of law enforcement, what's the FBI doing in Kenya, anyway? It was a crime committed in Africa against facilities owned by a country in the Middle East. The only relationship to the United States is that other Muslims have committed similar crimes here, as well as in dozens of other countries. In other words, there's no more justification for the FBI to grab the case than investigators from, say, Yemen or Lebanon. The FBI's insistence on taking over for Kenya officials is exactly the sort of imperial arrogance that gets taken for granted here and noticed everywhere else.)

Either way, the last thing the Bush Administration should be doing is waging, or even being perceived as waging, a war against 1.2 billion of the world's people. That perception--and, in many ways, reality--is out there. It is the perception that the United States and Israel (seen, by many Muslims, as effectively interchangeable) are out to not only apprehend a small number of violent criminals who happen to be Muslim, but to subjugate the entire Muslim world, with those criminals as the convenient pretext for its actions.

Judged in that light, US actions in Afghanistan and in its obsession with invading Iraq make a lot more sense. So does the seeming lack of concern at bin Laden's whereabouts. Oddly enough, the United States would at the moment have a lot more credibility in the Islamic world if it actually seemed serious about wanting to apprehend or thwart bin Laden. Instead, it is inspiring thousands of Osama imitators, and at the moment it's hard to imagine many of the world's Muslims using "United States" and "credibility" in the same sentence.

The Kenya attacks and their aftermath are reminding Muslims that the United States is not simply threatening war. It is already waging war; its targets are much, much broader than a few well-organized terror groups; and the people willing and inclined to fight back are also much, much greater in number than they were 15 months ago.

In any war each sides invariably claims victimhood; they insist that the enemy started it and is at fault. And so it is in this war, undeclared or not. Americans remember 9/11, and attacks like last week's; Muslims draw upon the whole of American foreign policy for the last 15 months, overlain on decades of American abuses during the Cold War and centuries of Western colonial barbarism.

The Bush Administration seems intent on pouring massive amounts of gasoline onto this fire. While the good, Peace Prize-toting Dr. Kissinger investigates whether the last attack on American soil could have been prevented, who, anywhere, is asking why it is that the next attack is being so assiduously incited?