In response to that calm, the
communis opinio is that we hyped the threat, needlessly went to war, mortgaged the Constitution — just collate the rhetoric from the Obama and Clinton campaigns — when there was never much of a post-9/11 threat from a rag-tag bunch of jihadists in the first place.
What is never discussed is how many Islamists flocked to Iraq, determined to defeat the U.S. military — and never got out alive. Or, more bluntly, how many jihadists did the U.S. Army and Marines kill in Iraq rather than in Manhattan?
And what was the effect of that defeat not only on the jihadists, but also on those who were watching carefully to see whether the terrorists should be joined in victory or abandoned in defeat? Who really took his eye off the ball — the United States by going into Iraq, as alleged, or Osama bin Laden and his jihadist lieutenants by diverting thousands there to their deaths, as is never mentioned?
When the war started, contrary to the current rhetoric, Osama bin Laden was popular in the Middle East, and the tactic of suicide bombing had won a sizable following. But after the war was fought, and despite years of anti-American rhetoric, bin Laden has never polled lower while support for suicide murdering in the Muslim Middle East continues to decline.
In 2001, the Arab street apparently thought, for all the macabre nature of suicide bombing, that it at least had brought the United States to its knees and such a takedown was considered a good thing; in the latter reflection of 2007 and 2008, it worried that such a tactic brought the United States military to its region, and guaranteed the defeat of jihadists along with any who joined them.
Iraq, as no one ever imagined, ended up as a landscape in which the United States and al-Qaeda would battle for the hearts and minds of the Arab world on the world stage. And in Anbar Province, the jihadists are losing — losing militarily and losing the support of the local Sunni population. Again, whereas the conventional wisdom holds that we have radicalized an entire generation of young Muslims, it may turn out instead that we have convinced a generation that it is not wise after 9/11 to wage war against the United States. In any case, there is no other constitutional Arab government in the Middle East that actively hunts down and kills al-Qaeda terrorists.
When the insurgency took off in late 2003, Europe immediately triangulated against the United States, courted the Arab world, and hoped to deflect jihadists by loudly proclaiming they were vehemently against the war in Iraq. This is in itself was quite remarkable, since the entire recent expansion of the European Union to the south and east had been predicated only on a partnership agreement with the United States to extend NATO membership — alone ensuring these weak new European affiliates American military protection.
Irony abounds: Since 2003, Europe — not the United States — has experienced a series of attacks, and near-constant threats, ranging from bombed subways and rail stations to Islamic demands to censor cartoons, operas, films, and papal exegeses.
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