PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

For the moment, the minds of Americans are not focused on terrorism. The failed Times Square bombing, along with the Christmas day attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit, brought a momentary spike of interest in the subject, but right now, most people are looking at other issues. What would happen if terrorism were to retreat back into its caves? How would we know that the threat was lessened or virtually gone? Would there be any announcement by the American government? Not likely.

We had almost eight full years of scare tactics by the Bush administration in order to align public views being expanding “security” measures and supporting two wars. Now, even the Obama administration, which proclaimed a new day, has fallen in line in calling terrorism an “enduring struggle” of our times.

What if it isn’t? As we have reported for years here at the TerryReport, 9-11 can easily be read as a failure for the terrorists, and especially bin Laden. In support of that view, writer Kai Bird has posted an opinion peace on CNN.com in which he muses about why the Arab world seems locked in time, not making progress on issues like democracy and freedom. He posits that the current wave of jihadists would not have come about had Egypt not started the six day war in 1967 in which Nasser of Egypt, and his armies, were soundly defeated by the Israelis. HERE IS A CLIP FROM THAT PIECE:

Sadik al-Azm, the Yale-educated, Syrian philosopher, described Nasser's defeat in the June war as a "lightning bolt" and a "shock" to the Arab ethos. Nasser's humiliation spelled the defeat of the idea of a secular path to Arab modernity. Nasser's once powerful notion that the Arabic-speaking peoples of the Middle East could unite under the banner of a progressive Arab nationalist movement was now discredited.

Over time, political Islam moved into this political vacuum. Al-Zawahiri himself wrote in his 2001 memoir that the "Naksa" -- the June 1967 defeat -- "influenced the awakening of the jihadist movement."

Al-Zawahiri today is hiding in a cave in Afghanistan, or dodging drone missile attacks in Pakistan. Someday he will be a dead man, along with his pitiful co-conspirator Osama bin Laden. The jihadists don't have any thing real to offer the Arabs of the 21st century. They can't put bread on the table in this era of globalization.

Al-Azm believes the jihadists have already lost: "There may be intermittent battles in the decades to come, with many innocent victims. But the number of supporters of armed Islamism is unlikely to grow, its support throughout the Arab Muslim world will likely decline. ... September 11 signaled the last gasp of Islamism rather than the beginnings of its global challenge."

There are a multitude of reasons to support the last statement, which have been covered over time here on The TerryReport. One of the most important is that the 9-11 attacks represented an overreaching by bin Laden and a failure to achieve his stated goal of causing American withdraw from the world stage. The attacks were based on a misunderstanding of America, its people, its position in the world and its basic core determination. Bin Laden and his followers believed that America was peopled by weak, suburban dwelling, morally corrupt citizens who would run and hide in the face of this one act of massive terroristic theater. The depth of his ignorance can hardly be measured.

Further, there has always been reason to believe that the very success of those attacks, as terrorism, might have frightened the Arab world. Suddenly, a sleeping giant was sleeping no more. Bin Laden did not have to worry about the day to day ramifications of his attacks, aside from his personal safety, but millions of others in the middle east did. Had he not carried them out, it is likely that Saddam would have continued for years in Iraq, perhaps even through today, and that the Taliban would still have Afghanistan to use as a base for training and promotion of terrorism on a smaller scale. .

History does not move from one easy conclusion to another. Winners turn into losers and those who were on the top can taste quick defeat. Indeed, history’s pages are filled with stories of great powers who won every battle but lost the war. On 9-11, bin Laden and al Queda set off a great fire that has as much probability of consuming themselves as the “far enemy” of America.

Doug Terry, 5.26.10

NOTE: The essence of the Kai Bird column on CNN.com was a rumination on why more progressive development has not occurred in the middle east. A strong argument can be made that the Arab world has systematically excluded itself from the development of modernity, both in recent and historical times. Some evidence of this exclusion was contained in the compendium history, Europe, by Norman Davies. The TerryReport will review some of that historical record here in the coming days.

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