Terror-bait

On one level, the "flypaper" theory seems to be working.

Four days after al-Qaida in Iraq declared all-out war on the country's Shiite majority, more than 250 people have been killed, 30 of them in a massive car bombing Saturday outside a produce market in a poor Shiite suburb east of Baghdad.

In all, at least 52 people were killed or found dead throughout the country Saturday …

And here's Sunday's news:

Insurgents assassinated a Kurdish member of parliament and police found 20 bodies shot to death and dumped in the Tigris River north of the capital, where there was no major violence Sunday for the first time in five days.

President Bush often speaks of fighting terrorists abroad so that we don't have to fight them here. That makes sense if you're talking about locating terrorist strongholds and attacking them, but that's not what the flypaper theory, or the war in Iraq, is about.

The flypaper idea was to send American troops to a country that wasn't a base for terrorism and to draw the terrorists there — "Bring it on!" — by using America's military personnel and the civilians of that country as terror-bait.

It's a bit difficult to reconcile such a strategy with another purported aim of the American-led invasion of Iraq: the "liberation" of the Iraqi people. That's probably why President Bush omitted his usual references to "fighting terrorists abroad so we don't have to fight them at home" in his remarks last week welcoming Iraq's President Talabani to the White House.

The idea of using Iraqi civilians as terror-bait seems to be quite popular with American voters, but President Bush apparently didn't have the chutzpah to mention it with the Iraqi president standing next to him there in the East Room.