Every once in a while, on a damp spring morning, I'll walk out into my yard to discover several huge mushrooms that simply weren't there before, not even 12 hours before. Maybe this has happened to you...you let your dog out at night, smelling the freshness of earth soaked with April rain, gazing over the wonder of your own grassy paradise. The next morning, you let the dog out again, and your yard is pocked with giant white pods, all whitish and brown, like dead flesh.

Where did they come from? How did they get there? They weren't there last night...or were they?

Actually, they were. You just couldn't see them.

I've been chatting with friends lately about the War on Terror and what an abstract principle said conflict is fated to be. Al Qaeda, for example, is not a heirarchical, tangible thing, but rather a shared idealogy that motivates and energizes an ever-changing network of individuals. Rather than discussing the winnability of a "war" against such an abstraction (which plenty of people are doing), I think it's useful to try to understand better the structure of this foe - what it looks like, where it grows, how it grows, what it can do - to see how we can face it.

I found the following description of mushrooms helpful...maybe you will too:

From the damp ground of the forest floor sprout tiny umbrellas. We call these mushrooms, although the real work is going on under the ground, unseen. In the Pacific Northwest we have the ideal warm and moist climate to produce hundreds of different kinds of mushrooms. In fact, the west coast of North America may be the best place on earth for mushrooms.

Mushrooms are the above ground fruiting bodies of an organism called a fungi. The fruiting bodies come in a wild variety of colors, shapes and sizes.

Fungi are made up of a microscopic set of cob-web like material called mycelia. Imagine if you had a giant iron and could squish an apple tree into a large, flat, one cell thick layer. The apple tree would expand in size and spread out over hundreds of feet. Then imagine this is buried in the top 6 inches of soil and the apples start popping up out soil when they grow. This is pretty much how a fungi works. The underground part may stretch for hundred of feet in all directions, in fact in some places, it has been learned that this underground network forms the largest living thing on the planet, stretching out for hundreds of acres.

Read the above sentences replacing the word 'Mushroom' with 'Terrorist' and the word 'Fungi' with 'Al Qaeda.' If you want, you could replace 'Pacific Northwest' with 'Middle East.' The terrorists themselves are the visible fruit of an amorphous underground ideology of bitter hatred and anger.