The Bush Administration causes national AIDS. Specifically, a national form of HIV -- I guess you could call it a national immunodeficiency virus or NIV.
I know, I can hear you saying WTF? Let me just preempt concern trolling by saying that I am not trying to use fear of AIDS as a twisted weapon for political argument's sake. I think the analogy is a good one, and suggests at the very least that we should NOT be following the Commander Guy in the military approach to fighting terrorism.
Stay with me...
First you have to know what it is that makes AIDS different from most other potentially deadly viral infections. Most deadly viruses (viri?) kill by attacking cells critical to the body's functioning, and by attacking faster than the immune system can handle. An exception to this is the bird flu virus, which causes such an overwhelming immune response that the infected person is killed by the fluids produced in the lungs by the immune response.
In the case of HIV, the disease is even more insidious than bird flu. Ironically, it is not that difficult for the healthy body to quickly counteract the presence of HIV and eliminate it from the bloodstream. The problem is that the cells that HIV infects are the very ones responsible for the front-line defense against viruses, the T cell. Even while a new T cell is successfully containing an HIV outbreak, it is being infected and will soon cause another new outbreak. So the body's own fight against AIDS results in a continuous attrition of T cells until the body is no longer able to fight other deadly diseases that would otherwise be no threat (opportunistic infections). So it is not the HIV virus that kills, directly speaking; it only works by running the body's forces into the ground and leaving the body open to almost any other threat that happens along.
I'm hoping the analogy, once pointed out, will be clear enough: By attacking a "threat" that is really not that dangerous or virulent (Iraq, HIV), any particular outbreak of violence is easily contained. The first round of virus is easily wiped out, the first volleys of the war are easily won, the tanks roll into Bagdhad and all is well.
But the very same effort to quell an outbreak feeds the fire by creating exactly the right conditions for a new generation of the threat to emerge -- the second wave of HIV, the growth in insurgents and terrorists.
There comes a turning point at which the forces are fully mobilized and yet the infection is so widespread that the outbreaks of virus are not that easy to contain with available resources any more. This is the point at which the body just begins to wear down; it used to be called "ARC" or AIDS-Related Complex. General fatigue and flu-like symptoms, night sweats, swollen lymph nodes. Compare to: Abrogation of civil liberties; widespread administrative incompetence; the decline in world standing; torture; mitigation of Habeas Corpus; fevered nationalism that sickly attempts to quell patriotic dissent with cries of "treason." These are all related symptoms to the underlying cause, but are not deadly in themselves...as long as the body lives to recover from them.
So to sum up: Terrorist cells, like HIV virus, once activated, are easy to kill and capture, unlike the threat in force of a traditional military or say, smallpox. The problem is that a military response, as we all know very well by now, itself acts to incubate more and more terrorists. The frontline response is an integral part of the life cycle of the threat. As long as we continue to respond in this way, our military/autoimmune response becomes progressively weakened until it cannot respond appropriately to some other, almost any other, threat.
Where the analogy breaks down is that we still sadly do not know exactly how to break the cycle of HIV in an infected person. But we do know how to stop creating more terrorists:
End this fucking occupation, stop fighting terror with tanks. Address the root of the problem, which is the disenfranchisement of the majority of Middle Eastern and third world populations from their own governance and self-determination. Certainly no small task, more like the challenge of the century (well, one of them). But at least it doesn't end in the death of our nation by the self-destruction of our defense systems.