The war in Iraq led to the collapse of al Qaeda support in the Persian Gulf. Al Qaeda declared the "battle for Iraq" to be a really big deal, and a struggle that they could not afford to lose. Al Qaeda did lose, and did so by killing over 50,000 Moslems and triggering an uprising by Islamic radicals in neighboring countries. Al Qaeda members in Saudi Arabia, who had long kept quiet inside the kingdom, in return for an informal truce and sanctuary, attacked. But once the bombs began going off in Saudi Arabia, popular opinion turned against the Islamic terrorists, and within three years, al Qaeda was crushed in what was, for all practical purposes, its homeland. Many wealthy Saudis, who had long contributed large amounts of cash to Islamic extremists, cut their support. While al Qaeda lost most spectacularly in Iraq, they suffered even more damage because of their defeat in Saudi Arabia.
Defeating the jihadis in Iraq was necessary to blunt their appeal in the Arab Moslem world, but we have much more to do if we are to accomplish more than a temporary victory over the current generation of jihadis and risk them coming back in another generation with even more deadly weapons that they leech from our society:
Ultimate victory against Islamic terrorism requires destroying the source of the anger and despair that creates the recruits. This is a cultural problem, and the cultural war moves slowly. The despots, and their millions of kin and associates, that rule the Moslem world, are not willing to surrender their power.
As I've long believed, we need a Moslem Awakening. And getting the cultural change requires the reformers to believe they can defeat the head-loppers. That's where we come in. Much as the Anbar Awakening was enabled by the conviction of the Iraqi Sunni Arabs that we would be around long enough to beat the jihadis, we must convince the Moslem world that we will help them beat the jihadis who want to crush reform.
