Bodansky:
Al-Qaida has always been an amorphous entity.
From an operational point of view, of significance are the terrorist groups run by and/or associated with the International Front for Confronting the Crusaders and the Jews.
There has been a major expansion since winter 2001 with the operational cadres (would-be terrorists) increasing by three-fold and the active support elements increasing by ten-fold.
Most significant is the flow of thoroughly westernized Muslims in Western Europe into the ranks of the would-be terrorists. Moreover, there is an ongoing radicalization and alienation of ever greater segments of the Muslim world even if only a relative few resort to violence.
However, of far greater significance is the fact that there is NO real counter-movement throughout the Muslim world since the fall of 2001. There is no popular movement calling for moderation, modernization, co-existence with the West, etc.
Osama bin Laden has never been in direct operational control over the majority of the Jihadist-Islamist groups.
Ayman al-Zawahiri has controlled, and is still controlling, the key elite terrorist formations committed to spectacular strikes of strategic or global significance.
The marked expansion of the Islamist-Jihadist movement since fall 2001, concurrent with the reduced importance of the Afghan-Pakistani hub, resulted in the growing pronouncement of the regional distinction of the various Islamist-Jihadist groups, particularly those with charismatic commanders and leaders.
Bin Laden, however, remains the undisputed supreme spiritual authority that charts the overall course of the Jihad.
Ideologically and theologically, all of these developments are still the manifestation of the growing alienation of the Muslim world from the West and the grassroots adoption of the call for fateful confrontation bin Laden has been advocating since late 1990s.
By mid-2002, the U.S. preoccupation with Baghdad the former sacred capital of the Caliphate, as distinct from Saddam Husseins secular Iraq resulted in the eruption of Islamist zeal based on the cataclysmic legacy of the Hulagu Khan syndrome.
I discuss this issue in great detail in the Introduction to "The Secret History of the Iraq War." Needless to say that the subsequent U.S. occupation of Iraq and the widespread destruction wrought only aggravated the situation and confirmed bin Ladens worst-case scenario.
In a nutshell, going to a warranted and justified war to disarm and topple the Saddan Hussein regime, the U.S. completely ignored the much wider and more profound global Islamic ramifications of such a move particularly the inevitable worldwide Islamist-Jihadist mobilization.
We now pay dearly for this oversight and will continue to do so for generations to come.
Bodansky is right...
Its Al Harb[House of war] folks.......we are in denial.
Thanks.