A key phrase in my recent e-mail exchanges has been, "The world has gone crazy." The hostage drama in Moscow; the shooting spree in the Washington, D.C. area; the bombing of two nightclubs in Bali; the Finnish teenager who blew up himself and six other people in a suburban shopping mall; the killing of a Japanese lawmaker; the assault on U.S. marines in the Middle East; the assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan -- all these terrifying events have happened in the space of only three weeks, and we are still trying to come to grips with them. Is this the World War III prophesied by many after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last fall? A world war without a front line and diplomacy, grand strategy and great battles, a war waged by individuals against societies and states when the attacking individuals are almost omnipotent and the attacked entities are bigger but all but helpless?

Maybe World War III is still too flashy a term, but the violence we are witnessing now is definitely something new. True, humankind has never been known for meekness, but even so, the post-9/11 carnage is somehow different. Its outstanding feature is that it is executed by tiny groups of people or even loners, with the most horrific results. Two dozen al-Qaeda members killed 3,000 people in New York and Washington and annihilated two gigantic landmarks of the modern Western world, the twin towers. Fifty Chechen terrorists captured 750 people in downtown Moscow, making Russia shudder. A retired U.S. Army sergeant and his 17-year-old companion shot 10 people inWashington and by so doing successfully paralyzed the metropolitan area for almost three weeks. A teenage loner in the suburbs of Helsinki devastated Finland's self-esteem and sense of security by detonating a single bomb. The number of people involved in the Bali attack is unknown, but in all likelihood we are talking about something less than a platoon.

Fanatics or loonies did shoot, blow up and kidnap in the past, but the zone of terror they caused used to be limited, local, national. This is not the case anymore. The al-Qaeda attack on the United States is very much connected to the Chechen attack on Moscow in October 2002; probably the same bin Laden people who trained the 9/11 hijackers also trained the Moscow hostage-takers. The two snipers arrested in Maryland had proclaimed their solidarity with the Sept. 11 attack. The fact that one of them is a convert to Islam is unimportant; what really matters is the man's fierce determination to undermine a society he didn't like. As for the bombing of the two nightclubs in Bali, it is an obvious echo of Sept. 11.