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R ecent political debate surrounding the war on terrorism has centered on evaluating the Bush administration’s performance. That worthy debate, however, tends to obscure the more fundaniental question: what can the United States hope to accomplish in the global war on terrorism? To answer that broader query, policymakers and analysts need to think more deeply about the prospects for successfully confronting transnational terrorist organizations, because these groups, such as al Qaeda, are different from national groups such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) or Hamas, on which so much discussion and research is based.

When the United States has talked about terrorist organizations other than al Qaeda, US officials have tended to blur the line between national and transnational ones, often lumping them together as part of the same global war on terrorism. In the summer of 2006 during the Israel-Hizballah …