Dramatic Failures

Ralph Peters lists the ways al Qaeda has screwed up:

* The 9/11 events were supposed to bring America to its knees. Instead, America got up on its hind legs and struck back ferociously. The terror haven in Afghanistan was swept away. American troops took Baghdad, challenging the decayed civilization in which fundamentalist terror flourishes. And terrorists have been pursued, arrested or killed around the world.

* Madly, Islamic extremists staged a series of attacks in Saudi Arabia, biting the hand that fed them so generously. (Arguments that the terrorists are coolly logical collapse in the face of this operational folly.) After years of denials, the Saudi ruling family grasped the horror they had unleashed and began a severe crackdown.

* Terrorists twice tried to kill Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s head of state. The result? Musharraf, who had been trying to have it both ways, turned on the Islamists, sending troops into tribal areas bordering Afghanistan for the first time and telling his security services, in no uncertain terms, to break the terror networks in Pakistan. Since then, we’ve seen hundreds of arrests, including the recent bonanza busts.

* In Iraq, the terrorists found themselves unable to discourage or dislodge U.S. troops and core Coalition forces, so they began bombing Iraqis. But blowing local kids to bits does not win friends and influence people in your favor. The most striking recent development in Iraq