We Americans have conjured so specific a vision of terrorists - swarthy, glowering Muslims mumbling fanatically about Allah - that we're missing the threat from home-grown nuts, people like David Burgert.
Mr. Burgert, a 38-year-old who last made a living renting out snowmobiles here in this spectacularly beautiful nook of northwestern Montana, had a terror plan that made Osama bin Laden's look rinky-dink. Not content merely to kill a few thousand people, Mr. Burgert's nine-member militia was planning a violent revolution and civil war to overthrow the entire United States government.
The plan, according to Sheriff James Dupont, was for the militia to use its machine guns, pipe bombs and 30,000 rounds of ammunition to assassinate 26 local officials (including Mr. Dupont), and then wipe out nerve gas, then we'd toss them in prison in an instant. But we're distracted by our own stereotypes, searching for Muslim terrorists in the Philippine jungle and the Detroit suburbs and forgetting that there are blond, blue-eyed mad bombers as well. We're making precisely the mistake that the Saudis did a few years ago: dismissing familiar violent fanatics as kooks.
In fact, militia members and Al-Qaeda members are remarkably similar.
Both are galvanized by religious extremism (America's militias overlap with the Christian Identity movement, which preaches that Jews are the children of Satan and that people of color are sub-human), both see the United States government as utterly evil, and both are empowered by the information revolution that enables them to create networks, recruit disciples and trade recipes for bio- and chemical weapons.
It would be a mistake to put one's faith in the militias' eternal incompetence. Jessica Stern of Harvard has written about an anti-governmecereal box shows the occupation zones Americans will be herded into after the United Nations takes over.
Another thing you learn here is how to deal with grizzlies. Don't be so focused on a distant moose that you ignore the bear behind you. And if it charges, stand your ground until it's 10 feet away, then shoot pepper spray into its eyes, and - very quickly - step aside.
Right now, I'm afraid that the Bush administration is so focused on the distant moose that we're oblivious to the local grizzlies like Dave Burgert creeping up on us.
