But [are Dennis's insane, anti-American ramblings] the entire story — especially if we look at the larger war on terror, in which the four-year Iraqi war is deeply embedded?
For example, do more or fewer countries have dangerous weapons programs? Is the Islamic Street more or less ready to help suicide bombers and terrorists? And are our allies in Europe and the Middle East more or less cooperative after the Iraqi war? Are the long-term trends favorable or unfavorable to our cause?
At the end of the Clinton administration, there was bipartisan worry that four countries may have had viable nuclear weapons programs — Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea. Two of those, we know now, do not; North Korea may not either. Iran is facing international scrutiny as never before. In fact, it is still possible that we will not see a single member added to the nuclear club during this current administration — in contrast to the acquisition of an “Islamic bomb” by Pakistan during the 1990s. ...
Radical Islam could not exist without receptive local populations that hide, shelter, and subsidize radical Islamists. Indeed, the current war will ultimately be won or lost by the degree to which Muslim tribes and Arab communities drain the water in which the al Qaeda sharks swim.
So has bin Laden used our invasion of an Arab Muslim country to rally support around his radical Islamic agenda? He tried, and after 2003 he seemed to be succeeding, and enjoying wide support in Pakistan where he probably hides. But according to a poll conducted by
WorldPublicOpinion.Org in April 2007, large majorities in Egypt (88 percent), Indonesia (65 percent) and Morocco (66 percent) acknowledged that “groups that use violence against civilians, such as al Qaeda, are violating the principles of Islam. Islam opposes the use of such violence." And in other Pew Global Attitudes polls of the Middle East, popular support for bin Laden himself has nose-dived, and with it approval of suicide bombing.
We all remember the European acrimony over the invasion of 2003, when both France and Germany led a continental-wide attack on the United States. But
the election-cycle leaders who whipped up that anti-Americanism — Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, especially — are both gone, and are mostly disgraced.
Few would have imagined in 2003 that a French President would, just four years later, be warning Iran — and the world at large — about the possibility of war should the theocracy continue on its path to nuclear-weapons acquisition.
As America fought radical Islamists of all sorts in Iraq, Europe was bombed in Madrid and London; Theo van Gogh was murdered in the Netherlands; cartoonists in Denmark and Sweden were threatened along with opera producers in Germany; and even the pope himself in Rome warned.
The old idea that the United States in Iraq "stirred" up otherwise somnolent jihadists finally lost currency. Instead, many European leaders began to see — however unwise they thought the strategy of promoting constitutional government in Baghdad had become — that
Iraq was but one theater in larger struggle against radical Islam. Subsequent European surveillance and wiretaps of suspected jihadists are now far less scrutinized than in the United States. There are probably more video cameras in London than in all major American cities combined. The continent’s immigration laws, at one time far more lenient than ours, are now becoming far more restrictive.
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