Caught up in the effort to end the sacrifice of young American lives in an Iraq appearing as a charnelhouse in the media, even more serious voices in the U.S. political arena appear to have taken leave of their common sense. There are debatable issues: whether the U.S. should have moved to preempt the bloody Sadam dictatorship as a part of restoring its security after 9/11, whether right and proper measures were taken in the pursuing the conflict and its aftermath, and where strategy and policies should go now.

But some of President Bush’s critics do deny Iraq is part of “the war on terror”, even advocating abandoning it in one form or another to release needed resources for fighting our “real” terrorist enemies. They seem to be blinded to the multitude of links which bind terrorism on every continent only excluding Antarctica at the moment.

Just as during The Cold War, Moscow leaders did not always direct nor even support directly every part of the grand Communist conspiracy to rule the world. But the liaisons were there through ideology and personalities. One little noted dramatic if tortured example: When Indian authorities discovered a gun running conspiracy for the Sikh terrorists [who were later to assassinate Prime Minister Indira Gandhi through her bodyguard], they found perpetrators in cahoots with Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization operatives provisioned by Syria and Moscow who were training guerrillas for the Sri Lankan Tamil terrorists. [who eventually assassinated Gandhi’s son] after Indian authorities had looked the other way at their training camps in South India in order to derail Colombo’s threatened anti-Communist defection to the West and the U.S.

However nihilistic, Islamofascism – and there probably is no better name for a movement for a supposed return to idealized pre-modern forms based on religiosity – is an ideology, too, which has vast if sometimes murky international links. Those go far beyond what is happening in Iraq. And even those who argue American intervention there produced new Isalmofascist cadre would have difficulty ignoring their manifestations around the globe at this very moment.

The permutations are innumerable, just as it was in worldwide Communism in its heyday, from Castro to Mao during The Cold War. The almost daily Kashmir terrorist incidents, for example, stem from unresolved struggle which divided British India into two new independent states. The weekly booody incidents in southern Thailand descend from an old argument about the rather late colonial deal for the accession of moribund Islamic-Malay sultanates to Thailand at the turn of the 20th century. Frequent bombings in Jakarta are manifestations of an argument as old as the nationalist movement against the Dutch between the more “secular” Javanese and other more orthodox Moslem ethnics whose very anti-colonialism stemmed from consolidation of Islam in the Indonesian Archipelego. The revolt in the southern Philippines against Manila could be traced beyond the American takeover after the Spanish-American War – and Gen. “Blackjack” Pershing’s suppression of the Moros -- to the long struggle against the Spanish colonial regime, even a form of the Iberian “reconquista’. The London subway bombings, as Prime Minister Tony Blair has properly said, were the product of more than a generation in the making, the inability of South Indian immigrants to integrate sufficiently into British life. The continuing deteriorating military situation of Moscow in Chechnya is the bitter end of more than 200 years of colonial repression.

But there is a link of religious fanaticism to all these conflicts, to what many consider an aberrant Islamic tradition. Not only are they ideologically linked, but as President Pervez Musharraf lays out in his recent memoir in more detail than those of us not privy to covert intelligence knew, they are tied to strong kinship bonds, as in this case between UK-bred citizens of Pakistani and Indian Moslem ethnicity and the Subcontinent.

Even conceding Washington’s geopolitical mistakes might have fed if not encouraged these explosions of violence, is there any vouchsafing threats against American security by spokesmen of all these groups – however incoherent – must be taken at face value after the events of 9/11? Nor need one argue merits or demerits of the Administration’s homeland security policies to know an open and democratic society such as America’s is always vulnerable to dedicated terrorism.

To doubt that others like the young fanatics who carried out those acts are not waiting in the wings is to believe in the tooth fairy. Whatever their origins, the ties binding victory or defeat in Iraq are inextricably linked to future American security. To assert otherwise, as some of the more Pollyannish talk in Washington does these days – including the search for The Magic Bullet by the flatulent Baker Commission or for aid and comfort from Damascus or Tehran – is the height of frivolity.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.