The great millenium bug scare will probably be one of the world's great nonevents, but there is a genuine reason for U.S. intelligence to fear that the new year might be inaugurated by spectacular bombings in several American cities.
The first indication that Islamic terrorists had marked the date on their calendars came from Jordan, where a ring of local extremists was rounded up earlier this month.
In Jordan, as elsewhere, the larger community of Islamic fundamentalists includes both very large social and political groups that do not themselves engage in any form of terrorism--although they defend and fund it--and violent Muslims who do nothing else. In Jordan, as elsewhere, their targets are mostly local rather than foreign: women who defy their village version of Islamic norms, the rare intellectual who dares to examine Islam critically and, above all, governments that are insufficiently Islamic--as all of them except for Afghanistan's Taliban apparently are, including ultra-strict Saudi Arabia.
In Jordan, as elsewhere, local security outfits try to keep track of what the extremists are doing and saying. One great problem is precisely that the two hardly correlate: Agents and intercepts keep picking up word of supposed imminent attacks that never materialize, making it very hard to detect the real threats. Overheated young men, with nothing much else to do, talk a lot and do little. Even with a multitude of Israeli targets within spitting distance, the various Hamas groups in Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank only pull off the occasional bombing or murder, never beginning to compete with Israel's road accidents when it comes to the total casualties they inflict.
Evidently there was some specifically persuasive talk that triggered the arrests in Jordan, very likely intercepted telephone or e-mail dialogues in which American targets were mentioned. That is a very significant indicator because Jordan's extremists have acted--if at all--against local and Israeli targets but never, so far, against American ones. The implication was that a general contractor somewhere outside Jordan--Osama bin Laden or his equivalent--was seeking to enlist Jordanian activists to serve as his subcontractors. It followed logically that there would be other subcontractors elsewhere, in fact several of them, because Jordan's extremists are quite low in the rankings as compared to the Shiite Hezbollah, Pakistan's Taliban admirers, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood offshoots, the Gaza-based Hamas, Iran's official terrorists operated by Pasdaran headquarters, and Algeria's Armed Islamic Group, or GIA.
