AL Qaeda and its affiliates are losing. They'll do their utmost to strike the United States before our elections. But even if they succeed, the effect will be the opposite of what they hope. And it won't change the fact that the terrorist beast is badly wounded. The recent wave of arrests, from Pakistan through the Middle East to Britain, stunned the terrorists and sent them crawling for ever-deeper cover. The blow against terror has been so indisputable that even our embrace-the-terrorists-with-understanding crowd stopped crying that the War on Terror's a failure (note the shift in campaign rhetoric).
But it's also a fact that this struggle is far from over. It will take at least a full generation — perhaps much longer — to rid the world of the demons who have appointed themselves as Allah's executioners. We do have some unexpected allies in this war, though: the terrorists themselves.
Counter to the made-on-campus nonsense that we can't succeed against terror, it's the terrorists who can't win. They can do horrific damage, creating scenes of slaughter among the innocent. But when it comes to employing such mega-violence, the terrorists are damned if they do, and damned if they don't. The terrorists need to stage spectacular events to convince the world of their power, to reassure their supporters of their continued viability and to draw fresh blood to the movement. Few flock to join a fugitive in a basement, but an Osama bin Laden allowed to appear triumphant — the Clinton administration's approach — is a magnet for every psychopath in the Muslim world. Yet when the terrorists do conduct dramatic attacks, they earn brief fame, but unite ever more of the world against them. Had al Qaeda and its surrogates laid low after 9/11, instead of creating strategically random carnage, they'd be in vastly better shape today.
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