Does Juan Cole Even Believe Juan Cole?

Former Weekly Jackass Juan Cole, at his blog Misinformed Conjecture, says that basically global terrorism amounts to a few hooligans:

The Bush administration is giving up the phrase "global war on terror."

I take it this is because they have finally realized that if they are fighting a war on terror, the enemy is four guys in a gymn[sic] in Leeds. It isn't going to take very long for people to realize that a) you don't actually need to pay the Pentagon $400 billion a year if that is the problem and b) whoever is in charge of such a war isn't actually doing a very good job at stopping the bombs from going off.

The Scotsman reports on the spectacular arrest of the Somalian suspect in the July 21 failed bombing attempts, saying, "The ethnicity of the eight London bombers, ranging from Somalis, to British-born sons of Pakistani parents and an Anglo-Jamaican Muslim convert, have surprised detectives investigating the attacks"...

...Former CIA analyst Marc Sageman estimates the number of radical Muslims who can and would do significant harm to the US in the hundreds.

That's right. The old "war on terror" was a war of the world's sole superpower on a few hundred people. (I exclude Iraq because it is not and never was part of any 'war on terror,' though the incredible incompetence of the Bush administration has contributed to the ability of terrorists to operate there.)

Funny how those 'few hundred people' have been killed dozens of times in Iraq alone, eh? As to not doing a good job on keeping the bombs from going off, I beg to differ...how many attacks on the American homeland since 9/11, Professor? Is it zero, perhaps?

Juan makes a big deal about how there's no common thread linking the London bombers and other terrorists, as they sometimes come from different countries or have differing ethnicities. Let's see, common threads, common threads...hey, here's one! They're all radical Islamists! Why didn't anyone think of this before?

Cole tries to deflect this obvious point by trying to confuse the issue with tales of our Muslim allies. Of course, no one (at least, hardly anyone) thinks our war is with Muslims, per se, so much as a particularly dangerous branch of radical Muslim ideology.

Fortunately, I don't need to spend a lot of time rebutting Cole, because Michael Totten has done so...beautifully...

(hat tip to Hit and Run via the Instapundit)...