It looks like where the rubber meets the road, but it ain't.

The Nigerian Miss World clusterfuck--in which people respond to the specter of women in bathing suits by rioting and killing a hundred of their countrymen--is the bleeding edge of the War on Terror. For the Nigerians, this is as more about tribal differences as religion. This is a local fight, just like Kashmir, Kabul, Chechnya and the West Bank.

But then it's not so local anymore. When we responded to the fundamentalist dream of a pan-African pan-Asian fundie Islamic state with a vision of a world without (Islamic) terrorism, we cemented our role as the Christian Zionist El Grande Diablo. Now all of a sudden we've got a big toe in all these hellhole civil wars, and we're looking for more.

But. Al Qaeda cell members don't come from Chechnya, Kashmir, Kabul, or the West Bank. They come from the middle class, which doesn't exist in those places. The middle class men hear about mean like Bello Yawa:

Bello Yawa, a 50-year-old Muslim, clutched his face and wept when he saw the body of his adult son lying on a street corner. "This morning I closed the gates to my house. The army and police came and forced their way in. They took my two sons and brought them outside, and they didn't return," he said. "I don't know why ... even policemen have turned against us. They are not supposed to take sides."

And they want kill to the great satan. It's these middle class guys we've got to look out for. Change their minds and stay the hell away from the meat grinders on the periphery.