Eleven years after Mission Accomplished, the "evil-doers" are clearly winning

Patrick Cockburn has a rather dismal assessment of our battle against militant Islam on view at Counterpunch today.

Seems the trillion dollar War on Terror has made the evil-doers stronger while bleeding the Nations of Virtue nearly to death financially and morally.

Cockburn confines his observations to the Middle East. In reality the picture is even more dismal than he suggests.

Thanks to NATO's foolhardy removal of Gaddafi, al-Qaeda inspired insurrections have become a huge factor in Africa, as far south as Nigeria and east to Kenya and Somalia.

"Stability" in Pakistan is largely a media PR fabrication. There is no question that radical Islam of the jihadist persuasion is much stronger there today than when W made his announcement on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln in 2003. The Sharif government mainly controls the country's news media, UN seat, and, at least so far, its nuclear arsenal. But all of that will eventually be in play.

In the past few years we have also witnessed something almost unheard of at the time Bush declared victory; the spectacle of supposedly "westernized" Muslim youth heading from their homes throughout the NATO nations to take up arms against those nations on the battlefields of Asia and the Middle East.

Since the Bush pronouncement, the "bad guys" have gone from strength to strength. If and when Isis and its jihadist allies consolidate their hold on parts of Syria and Iraq, they will have a fledgling state that poses an existential threat to every Arab state in the neighbourhood that has allowed itself to be corrupted by The Great Satan.

Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf statelets are living on borrowed time. Our newly installed "strongman" in Egypt is too; we've proven to every pious Muslim that the moderation of the Muslim Brotherhood gets no respect from the West.

When we connive in the suppression of the moderates, we leave the Arab street a simple choice; complete capitulation on the one hand, or armed resistance on the other.

It's not hard to see which side has the momentum.