Today is Guy Fawkes Day, when the Britons whom I live among celebrate the foiling of a plot to blow up Parliament and the royal family in 1605. The leader of the botched operation, Catholic militant Guido Fawkes, is traditionally burned in effigy at great bonfires across the land. Nowadays, the holiday has become more of a simple fall festival, a family night out with fireworks and fun fairs laid on by the local authorities and various institutions.But this modern innocence masks what was a far more vicious and brutal affair, as the “counterterrorism surge” launched by King James I

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The nightmare scenario that the “War on Terror” is ostensibly meant to address — with its massive outlay of tax dollars and death — is now coming to pass: an Islamic nation which has extensive ties to sectarian terrorism, a nuclear arsenal and a proven record of blackmarket proliferation of WMD technology is collapsing into the status of a failed state. But of course this scenario doesn’t apply to any of the three countries already shattered by Terror War “shock and awe” — Iraq, Afghanistan and <span