Stardate 20021013.1320

(Captain's log): There is a shadow war taking place.

There's a big, showy, obvious war. We fought it in Afghanistan. We're going to be fighting it in Iraq. We'll probably have to fight it in Somalia and maybe in other places. When we fight, we fight with big, showy weapons: monstrous bombers, imposing tanks, weapons out of science fiction. Bombs dropped from 30,000 feet that can strike a specific truck. Missiles fired from a thousand miles away which can select a particular building in the middle of the city while sparing all those around it. Ships the size of small cities which can steam at 40 knots for up to three years without refueling. Death rays mounted in 747's which can destroy a rocket or aircraft a hundred miles away with a powerful laser beam. Soldiers wearing computerized helmets which let them see in the dark and communicate with one another via wireless networking, effectively making them clairvoyant. Satellites which can read the license plate on a car.

But in the shadow war, the weapons are intelligence, electronics intercepts, spies, analysis of bank records, patterns of movement. The shadow war is unglamorous, and many of its best soldiers are nerds. There's no glory for the soldiers in the shadow war, because we never hear of their victories. We only see their defeats. It may be decades before the information about this shadow war is declassified and we find out how many attacks on the US were detected and prevented in the last year.

But when our soldiers in the shadows lose, people die.

The big, loud war tends to be fought in one place at a time. Though the bombers may be flying from Germany, or Diego Garcia, or even from Missouri, they all target the same place. But the shadow war is being fought everywhere, because attacks can happen anywhere.

President Bush made a speech earlier this year where he said that the nations of the world would have to choose sides: either they're with us or they're against us. That wasn't a threat. It wasn't hyperbole. It was literal truth. In this war there can be no bystanders. If you try to sit out the war, then by your acquiescence you aid those opposing us in this war, and you make yourself a high profile target.

The bomb blast in Bali yesterday has resulted in hundreds of casualties, most of them tourists. Tony wrote to me from Australia this morning asking why it was that none of the news reports he'd seen said that most of the dead and wounded were probably Australians. I think the reason is that right now no one really knows. It will be days before there's anything like a reasonable list of who died and who was maimed.

But the smart money bets on most of them being Australian. That area was a very popular vacation spot for Australians, though it sure as hell won't be anymore.

As I do every day, I went to my local mall for breakfast this morning. I sat there near the outdoor food court, eating my doughnuts and drinking my coffee in the peace and quiet – or at least as quiet as any place can be when five kids under the age of 3 are delightedly getting themselves soaked playing in a computer-controlled fountain.

That pocket of tranquility could have been destroyed in an instant. A truck could have pulled in and detonated, instantly turning me and those kids into hamburger and turning a nice mall into a pile of burned out wreckage filled with pieces of corpses. But it didn't happen, nor did I really expect it to, because our shadow warriors have been winning.

There are many who believe that the kind of peace and freedom that we enjoy is the natural state of the human race, the default to which all will return if only they could somehow convince us all to disband our armies and stop fighting. But the natural state for humans is barbarism, cruelty, violence and death; our peace and prosperity is an artificial bubble which must actively be maintained and defended at all times. If we cease to be vigilant it will vanish. My ideological opponents think that armies cause wars, and that war can be prevented by getting rid of armies. But you don't need an army to fight a war; no army attacked Bali last night.

Australia is also a free nation, which tolerates diversity of opinion. Part of our price for freedom is that we have to tolerate loons, and so do they. Tim Blair writes that the appeasers are already trying to blame it on Prime Minister John Howard's support of the United States.

Blair is angered by what they say, and I think the majority of Australians will not agree with those sentiments. Looking at potentially two hundred or more Australian dead and many hundreds more who will survive minus arms and legs, or were horribly burned, I do not think that the average Australian will say, "Well, maybe if we give them what they want, they'll leave us alone."

This attack didn't happen in Australia. It happened in Indonesia. It didn't happen because Australia is a belligerent in the war; it happened because Indonesia refused to become one.

This attack was a failure in the shadow war, but it happened because Indonesia refused to fight it. It happened because security in Indonesia was lax, and because the government there refused to make an active effort to seek out and eliminate terrorists. It happened because the government of Indonesia hoped that by wishing really hard they could make the war happen somewhere else, and that by pretending there