The big ID terrorist cover

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Most terrorists seem like bumbling losers if they're caught before the act: That's certainly true of the Fort Dix, N.J., jihadists who took their terrorist training DVD to the local audio store to be copied.

It was also true of the Islamists arrested in Toronto last year for plotting to behead the prime minister, one of whose cell members had a bride who wanted him to sign a pre-nuptial agreement committing him to jihad. The Heathrow plotters arrested while planning to blow up U.S.-bound airliners included a Muslim convert who had started out as the son of a British Conservative Party official with a P.G. Wodehouse double-barreled name and a sister who was a Victoria's Secret model and former wife of tennis champ Yanick Noah.

But then Mohamed Atta and the September 11, 2001, gang would have seemed pretty funny if you had run into them in that lap-dance club they went to before the big day. The club girls remembered them only as very small tippers. Most terrorists are jokes until the bomb goes off.

So, when we're fortunate enough to catch them in advance, it's worth pausing to consider what they tell us about the broader threat we face. According to the genius headline writers at the New York Times, "Religion guided three held In Fort Dix plot." You don't say. Any religion in particular?

Well, the trio were Muslims, but Albanian Muslims -- i.e., they weren't Arabs and they didn't have names like Muhammad and Abdullah (though their accomplices did). Even if America were minded to profile, it is harder to profile successfully against chaps with names like "Shain Duka" (Fort Dix) or "Richard Reid" (the shoebomber) or "Jermaine Lindsay" (a July 7 London subway bomber) or "Muriel Degauque" (a Belgian lady who self-detonated in a suicide attack on U.S. forces in Iraq) or "Jack Roche" (an Australian arrested for plotting to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Canberra).

Second, the young Duka brothers are "radical Muslim" sons in a family of otherwise "moderate Muslim" oldsters. That, too, fits a pattern of de-assimilation, of young Western Muslims far more implacable and hostile than their parents and grandparents. The London bombers were British subjects born and bred, radicalized in the vacuum of contemporary multiculturalism.

The father-in-law of one of the Toronto plotters was the pharmacist at the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry base. The Princess Pats have done sterling work in Afghanistan, and pop supports their mission. But his daughter doesn't, and she named his grandchild after a Chechen terrorist killed by the Russians.

Third, what then radicalized so many Western Muslims? Answer: In many cases, the Balkans. When Yugoslavia collapsed 15 years ago, Jacques Poos told the Americans to butt out: "The hour of Europe has come," he declared confidently. Mr. Poos was foreign minister of Luxembourg, a country as big as your hot tub, but he held the European Union's rotating "presidency" at the time and, as it happened, the Americans were very happy to butt out. "We don't have a dog in this fight," said then Secretary of State, James Baker.

Well, the hour of Europe came and went, and a couple of hundred thousand corpses later the EU was only too happy for the Americans to butt back in again. So NATO bombed the Christian Serbs in defense of the Albanian Muslims, and a fat lot of good it did if the Duka brothers are any indication.

In theory, Mr. Baker was right. But out there in the Balkans, if you're one of the dogs in the fight, great-power evenhandedness can seem pretty one-handed by the time you get to hear about it. Don't take my word for it. Here's Osama bin Laden: "The British are responsible for destroying the Caliphate system. They are the ones who created the Palestinian problem. They are the ones who created the Kashmiri problem. They are the ones who put the arms embargo on the Muslims of Bosnia so that 2 million Muslims were killed."