Tigers (not from Detroit).

They were doing what most of the rest of us were doing--buying into the conventional wisdom that the "war on terror" was the war that dare not speak its name. But, funnily enough, intentionally or not, the Tamil Tigers wound up getting caught in the net. Their long campaign reached its apogee in a spectacular bloodbath at Sri Lanka's principal airport two and a half years ago, a couple of months before 9/11, back when nobody was paying attention. By February of last year, they'd given up plans for an independent Tamil state and their chief negotiator in London was suing for peace on the basis of some sort of regional autonomy. It's an uneasy truce, but tourists are returning to the island and the Tamil stronghold of Jaffna is being touted as "the new Phuket" (the Thai resort beloved of vacationing Brits).

You can find other examples of long-running local conflicts around the world from Burundi to Nepal that seem to have mysteriously wound down over the last two-and-a-quarter years. Might be just coincidence. Or it might be that putting the bank transfers of certain groups on an international watch list has choked off the funding pump for a lot of terrorism. Even nickel-and-dime terrorists need nickels and dimes, and in your average war-torn basket-case state that usually means fundraising overseas.

Professor Barnett was wrong when he wrote that "you cannot in logic wage war against a phenomenon, only against a specific enemy." Sometimes the phenomenon is the enemy. Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang trained in Saddam's Iraq. The IRA has ties to Qaddafi and to Colombian drug terrorists. Even the old line that my enemy's enemy is my friend doesn't quite cover these alliances: Saddam was pally with the Germans, and Gerry Adams and Co. have friends in high places in Washington who wouldn't take kindly to the IRA's Hispanic outreach. What drew these people together is the phenomenon: the mutual lack of squeamishness about blowing the legs off grannies in pizza houses. In that sense, they've more in common with the international piracy and slavery networks of two centuries ago, as the president implied in London in his tip of the hat to the Royal Navy for stamping out the slave trade. The so-called idiot figured it out quicker than the smart guys: In the days after September 11th, he was shrewd enough to identify the real enemy and declare war on it.

Two years on, in all kinds of tiny corners of the globe you never hear about on CNN, the bad guys are feeling the heat.