I think you need to take a step back, yourself. First off, I am no Bush-hater, having actually defended him on these boards from several attacks by people who were Bush-haters.
Second, when we are considering threats to the world, I suspect that a few thousand individual zealots who are willing to inflict harm in periodic adventures offer a far less grave threat than a fully armed nation guided by people who will stop at little to reach some “ideal” world view.
Islamism is inherently reactionary and is being carried out by individuals and small groups around the world. Those groups are constantly in danger of alienating themselves from their respective power bases. The Saud family is notoriously corrupt, so one group of Wahhabists try to destabilize the Saudi government by terrorist acts. They have no visible plan or platform (aside from a vague yearning for some “ideal” Muslim state) and do not actually have the support of the majority of their fellow citizens (who fear their violence just as their actual targets do). When Fundamentalists were able to take control of Iran, it was only a very short time before the majority of Iranians began seeking ways to move beyond their power. So far, the people of Iran have been less than successful, but the ayatollahs cannot maintain their rule through fear forever. When Arafat accepts the “help” of suicide bombers, he does nothing to shore up his own power base. He has been in danger of a revolt among the Palestinians for several years (keeping power only because Sharon plays into his hands as the worse enemy to the Palestinian people). Muqtada al-Sadr has been discovering, in the last week, that too much terror can rebound against one as the citizens of Sadr City have actually begun cheering the national Iraqi and U.S. forces in the current siege, reacting against the indiscriminate violence that al-Sadr has provoked.
The terrorism that has emanated from the Islamists is horrific–otherwise it would not be terrorism. But it is ultimately self-defeating.
The Neo-Cons, with their insistence on proclaiming themselves as the bearers of Truth (not unlike the Islamists), so that international cooperation is simply an impediment to their goals, risk isolating the world’s most powerful nation from the rest of the world, creating enemies where we need not do so, and making future cooperation on important issues nearly impossible. Their myopic adherence to Wolfowitz’s college term paper, in which they ignore the reality of any intra-national situation on the basis that they know better than the people who live in a country what those people “really” want, increases the danger that most of our international efforts will fail. Their view that unilateral action is not merely acceptable, but preferred, could lead to a coalition of the entire world against the U.S. Their short attention span (Oh? Were we supposed to provide a budget item for helping Afghanistan after we overthrew their government?) leads them to leave missions undone while they chase after new enemies–created or imagined. Their fiscal irresponsibilty scares even they allies among the Conservatives. What happens when the world’s most powerful (and almost unchallengeable) nation decides that it needs to begin taking things to keep from imploding as its debt soars to unimaginable heights? The Neo-Cons can also be self-defeating, but they can harm far more people as they destroy themselves.
Just as carjackers are more frightening than corrupt executives on a day-to-day basis, but the CEOs that destroy corporations harm more people in the long run, destroying jobs and the life-savings of investors, so terrorists are scarier than world leaders, but are actually less of a threat to the majority of people. (And the point to which I referred involved world threats, not fear.)