Falling into al-Qaeda's trap.

Defenders of the Bush administration's war in Iraq have often invoked the "flypaper strategy"--namely, the idea that by attracting Islamist radicals to Iraq, the United States would be fighting them "over there" rather than "over here."

The problem is this: getting the United States mired in Mesopotamia is central to al-Qaeda's strategy. To borrow a phrase from Steinbeck's classic novella The Moon Is Down, the Islamist movement sees the United States as the flies in this scenario, and are quite happy to have the "flies" conquer the "flypaper."

That strategy is mapped out in The Management of Savagery, a 268-page document written by al-Qaeda insider Abu Bakr Naji and recently published in an English translation by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. As summarized by ABC News: "Al-Qaeda's strategic vision involves challenging the United States and its allies overseas using small- to medium-scale attacks." The manual concludes that the 9/11 attack "forced the U.S. to fall into the 'trap' of overextending their military" and that "it began to become clear to the American administration that it was being drained."

Rather than plotting to attack the U.S. homeland, al-Qaeda prefers to draw the U.S. into distant fights in the Muslim world, concludes Will McCants, a West Point fellow.

"Naji [author of the al-Qaeda study] believes the way you really hurt empires is to make them commit their military far from their base of operations," McCants observes. Naji doesn't support further 9/11-style attacks on the U.S. "because fight now he feels al-Qaeda has the upper hand in the public relations battle" in the Muslim world. "The point is to make [the U.S.] come in" as invaders, where the Muslims who fight our troops will "be seen as fighting the crusaders directly so you'll win over the public.... That's the way they want to get to the U.S."