I, for one, refuse to become obsessed with worst-possible scenarios. Not just because it’s bad for the soul, but because I believe it’s realistic to think there won’t be an all-out global war with nukes and biological weapons turning the Earth into a desolate piece of rock–from which, 20,000 years later, a new race of fantasy-novel wizards and elves might emerge. (Yes, even in discussing why I won’t buy into it, I can’t help but scoff.)

Nor do I buy into the theory, currently spreading in some Christian-conservative circles, that this is the start of the global Apocalypse, originally believed to have been scheduled for Y2K but merely delayed due to inaccuracies in the human calendar.

You see, such an Armaggedon would require the willing participation of a helluva lot more players than just one elected-with-an-asterisk President and one or two small, impoverished dictatorships. The (presumably) wiser, cooler minds of Europe, Canada, Asia, and those Muslim states with dependencies upon the Western economy will, I predict, bring some relative sanity to the current war-bluster. One can at least imagine some Japanese and Germans who’d rather not see another huge intercontinental blow-up.

But a lot of icky things far short of all-out doom could still happen.

The worst of what I consider the plausible scenarios is for this to become an excuse for a Gulf War II–a drawn-out war of old-fashioned territorial conquest, whose ultimate, unofficial purpose would be to install oil-company-friendly regimes in Iraq and elsewhere. That would lead, among other things, to division in North America and Europe, bringing back so many of the worst aspects of the ’60s.

Another likely scenario is an attempted War on Terrorists operated just like the War on Drugs–a punitive, corrosive, futile, top-down militarized response to a diffuse, decentralized, stateless opponent. And since there is no one single unified terrorist organization (just like there was never really one “Mafia”), the U.S. warmongers would be able to keep this war going indefinitely, perhaps against a different devil-du-jour every year or two.

If the bombings were done by the type of gang the FBI currently claims did them, it’s less of an army and more of an informal association of self-styled crusaders; some with closer ties to like-minded warriors, others acting largely on their own. It can’t be completely neutralized. It can only fade away, with its pieces gathering fewer recruits and dwindling financial support.

And what might cause such a subculture to fade away? A dwidling sense of relevance, which could occur if nations (including Middle East nations and their respective sponsors) could somehow learn to stop fighting and start helping one another.

Peace really is the answer. An active, working peace, that is. The kind of peace that can be more difficult than war, because it’s tougher to conceive (or to conceive of).