Tell me again...we're winning, right?

Terry McDermitt, a reporter for the LA Times, has just published "Perfect Soldiers," a detailed study into many of the Sept. 11 2001 hijackers. It reinforces something I've been thinking for three years. The fundamentalists who pose the greatest danger to Westerners in their home countries are not the ones Bush said to "Bring em on" in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Such glimpses of the hijackers' pre-9/11 lives not only underscore just how ordinary many of these men were, but also suggest, as Mr. McDermott writes, that it is "likely there are a great many more men just like them" out there in the world. It ominously suggests how widely the idea of jihad has taken hold among middle class citizens in the Middle East, and it suggests that Al Qaeda has found willing recruits among Muslims who came from "apolitical and unexceptional backgrounds."

Indeed, "Perfect Soldiers" replaces the caricatures of outsize "evil geniuses" and "wild-eyed fanatics" with portraits of the 9/11 plotters as surpassingly mundane people, people who might easily be our neighbors or airplane seatmates. It gives us pictures of Jarrah signing his notes to Ms. Sengün "with a long drawn-out goodbyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, followed by multiple exclamation points," of Mohamed el-Amir (a k a Mohamed Atta) as a slight young man padding about his student apartment in blue flip-flops, of Ramzi bin al-Shibh going on dates with a modern-dance student and subsisting on frozen pizzas with tuna.

There's not much new in the book, at least if you've paid attention. But it is a reminder that the poor illiterate goatherds swept up in the quick war in Afghanistan or the suicidal murderers pouring over the border into Iraq are not the ones who will devise simple, yet devastating ways to inflict damage on innocents in Western cities.

No, they're students, teachers, young entrepreneurs also residing in Western cities seething with rage and impotence as they watch the news from Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

This is not to say we should be rounding up students, teachers, and young entrepreneurs, nor is it to say that it was U.S. actions that directly resulted in the destruction of the World Trade Towers. It is to say, though, that bin Laden's effort to engage and enrage the larger Islamic world may be coming to pass, fertilized by the mindless way in which Bush and the neocons have chosen to address the threat of Islamict terrorism.