The war on Al Qaeda is having a strange, perverse consequence. As terrorists find it harder to attack political, military and symbolic targets, they are shifting to softer ones that are easier to hit. But the effects of these new strikes may be even more damaging in spreading fear. Most people can't imagine being on an American destroyer. They can imagine checking into a beach resort. If this new approach becomes Al Qaeda's new strategy, terrorists will have an inexhaustible supply of targets that can never be secure. There are, for example, more than 300,000 hotels in the world.

This new terrorism is rising partly because it can. Terrorists can get weapons more easily, travel and communicate more easily and get their messages out more easily. The reality of a globalized world is that small groups of people can now cause big trouble.

This new world has been produced by technology but also by a shift in mentality. After all, the surface-to-air missiles that were fired on the Arkia airplane have been around for more than 30 years. But for the most part, people have chosen not to use them to hit civilian airliners. Bombing resorts is something terrorists could have done for decades. They haven't until recently. Why?

The answer is ideology. Today's Islamic terrorism is motivated not by a specific policy but a nihilistic rage against the modern world. The old rule was, terrorists want a few people dead and a lot of people watching. In other words, they sought to publicize their cause but not kill so many as to offend most people. The new Islamic terrorists want a lot of people dead and even more watching. This shift in mentality can be seen even in Israel, where a classic nationalist struggle is slowly being superceded by a messianic-religious one. Islamic groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad broke with the Palestinian nationalists and began routinely attacking not just Israeli public figures, soldiers and settlers but ordinary Israeli civilians--and in large numbers. If this practice spreads, it will mark the breakdown of basic rules of the road on which civilization rests.

How does one combat this trend? Things are not as bleak as they look. Terrorists today have few substantive advantages. Their resources are pitiful when compared with the combined power of governments all working together. That means more international cooperation and coordinated police work. In places like Kenya it means nation-building. Steven Simon, formerly head of counter terrorism at the National Security Council, recalls that after the 1998 embassy bombings, the United States had to ship the Kenyan law-enforcement agencies not just computers and network equipment, but even Xerox machines. "Fighting terrorism in weak states is very tough," he notes. If one looks at where Al Qaeda is active now--Yemen, Indonesia, northern Pakistan, southern Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia--one gets the point. You can buy a surface-to-air missile for as little as $2,000 in Somalia today.

Edward Luttwak, a military strategist, points out that "the terrorists are at an inherent disadvantage. Every time they attack they emerge. So you hunt them down, find them and kill them." The single most important effect of terrorism, he points out, is that it produces national cohesion in the target countries. "You get the kind of resolve and willingness to fight that you would not get without a war with its mass casualties. You get the unifying effects of war with relatively modest casualties."

But the military and intelligence war must be complemented by an ideological struggle, which is at the heart of this new terrorism. If the pernicious ideology of extremism and intolerance--on display in last week's riots in Nigeria--spreads through the world of Islam, no one will be safe, no matter how effective the military strategy. You cannot deter someone who wants to die anyway. The people who are losing the most are Muslims. Terror and extremism will make the rest of the world isolate, suspect and abandon the entire world of

Islam, leaving it to fester in its backward condition. How many tourists and businessmen are going to go to Nigeria and Kenya in the next few years? Muslim political figures must stop cowering in fear of the extremists and take them on.

The United States, for its part, must put this ideological struggle at the heart of the war on terror. So far the mismatch between its military and political strategies is huge. The Pentagon has just requested $10 billion a year to fight the war on terror. (That doesn't include its $360 billion annual budget.) At about the same time, Colin Powell cancelled a much-anticipated speech outlining all that the administration was doing to foster political reform in the Arab world because the signature project, totaling $25 million, had already begun. That's a 400:1 ratio between military and political effort. Of course, throwing money at a big problem won't solve it. But even when some is wasted, money can produce results. Just ask the Pentagon.

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