But while jihadists did flock to Iraq hoping to win one for the caliphate, getting their asses kicked there (and in Afghanistan) has not led to much action in the Arab Street for overthrowing Arab governments and forming a jihadi army to sweep the West out of the Middle East.
Al Qaeda is weaker, and reduced to begging Moslems in the West to take up arms against us:
It has come a long way from the early days of as Sahab, when bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders issued defiant threats of launching a follow-on attack against the United States that was going to be even more destructive than 9/11. The group is now asking individual Muslims to conduct lone-wolf terrorist attacks and to follow the examples of Hasan and Mir Amal Kansi, the Pakistani citizen who conducted a shooting at a stoplight outside CIA headquarters in January 1993 that killed two CIA employees.
Such attacks will be deadly on a local scale, but they won't be very likely to be on the scale of 9/11 as planned or even as executed.
And the jihadis should be careful what they wish for. When jihadis could not kill enough American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, they settled for killing local civilians in those countries. Moslem reaction to jihadi bombings on themselves did not, strange as it may seem to the jihadis, did not include feeling honored to be involuntary martyrs to the cause. Moslems turned on the jihadis.
If local jihadis start killing our people in ones and twos or a score or more at a time in our places of work or entertainment, the American people will react with anger at the jihadis and not retreat from the world. It will renew our commitment to killing our jihadi enemies.
Jihadis might want to consider whether Allah is really on their side, after all. Hejust doesn't seem to be that into the jihadis.
