Winning the 9/11 Wars

Defeating Islamo-Arab Imperialism requires commiting to do so

On April 30, 2012, Barack Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser made a bold prediction: It was possible to envision a world in which al Qaeda's central leadership would no longer [be] relevant to the United States and the organization itself would be eliminated. If the decade before 9/11 was the time of al Qaeda's rise, and the decade after 9/11 was the time of its decline, then I believe this decade will be the one that sees its demise, boasted John Brennan.


This wasn't an analytical assessment. It was a political claim, coming just six months before the 2012 election, at the beginning of the Obama administration's coordinated public relations campaign to portray al Qaeda as on the run. Like his boss, Brennan was reflexively dismissive of the jihadists' desire to capture territory and build a radical Islamic state. In a June 29, 2011, speech, Brennan had dismissed al Qaeda's grandiose vision of global domination through a violent Islamic caliphate as absurd, a feckless delusion.