NO DOG IN THIS FIGHT:

Al Qaeda's next target? (Brian Knowlton, December 4, 2004, International Herald Tribune)

Europe seems increasingly likely to be the target of the next major Qaeda attack, a trend that could intensify when scores of Qaeda-affiliated militants who left European countries to fight in Iraq return home, several top terror analysts said.

Europe is vulnerable in ways that the United States is not, said many of those attending what was described as the largest conference ever on Al Qaeda, the group behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

Europe's large, growing and poorly integrated Muslim population, its prisons and fundamentalist mosques where extremism is nurtured and laws that constrain the European police more than their American counterparts are all factors, said the analysts, who included former CIA counterterror officials and foreign terror specialists.

Experts at the conference Thursday, sponsored by the nonprofit New America Foundation, said that they did not expect new attacks to match the breadth of the Sept. 11 attacks, in large part because of improved security. Instead, they expect more operations resembling the coordinated March 11 bombings in Madrid, which killed 191 people.

There's nothing in it for us to intervene in a fight between Secularism and Islamicism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 4, 2004 8:29 AM