The state of the war on terror

Fareed Zakaria, hardly a neocon, says there is reason to think that things are going our way:

But if you set aside the war [in Iraq], terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years. In both the START and MIPT data, non-Iraq deaths from terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001.

The reason why? People seem to be getting sick of the carnage:

The Simon Fraser study notes that the decline in terrorism appears to be caused by many factors, among them successful counterterroris operations in dozens of countries and infighting among terror groups. But the most significant, in the study's view, is the "extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years." These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view, the less they support them.

Zakaria doesn't say it, but I think that this is a huge benefit from the war in Iraq. I believe that as long as terrorism was targeted against the West, like during the Africa embassy bombings or 9/11, it was easy for Muslims in the Middle East to support. When it occurs in your back yard, such as Iraq, and the victims are fellow Muslims, it becomes a lot more difficult to stomach and the consequences of support for terrorism are much more concrete.

Ultimately the war on terror isn't going to be won through superior firepower or killing a sufficient number of jihadis. It's going to be won by changing people's minds, and demonstrating the failure of the jihadi ideology. This is why Iraq, as much as people deny it, is the central front of the war on terror. Destroying Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is not enough, for the U.S. to ultimately prevail it will have to demonstrate for the failures of the opposing side as well as a competing vision/model to follow. A stable, secure, tolerant Iraq can be that model.

As for the more narrow aspect of the terror war -- Al Qaeda -- The New Republic says they aren't doing so hot these days either:

Why have clerics and militants once considered allies by Al Qaeda's leaders turned against them? To a large extent, it is because Al Qaeda and its affiliates have increasingly adopted the doctrine of takfir, by which they claim the right to decide who is a "true" Muslim. Al Qaeda's Muslim critics know what results from this takfiri view: First, the radicals deem some Muslims apostates; after that, the radicals start killing them. This fatal progression happened in both Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s. It is now taking place even more dramatically in Iraq, where Al Qaeda's suicide bombers have killed more than 10,000 Iraqis, most of them targeted simply for being Shia. Recently, Al Qaeda in Iraq has turned its fire on Sunnis who oppose its diktats, a fact not lost on the Islamic world's Sunni majority.

Read the whole thing. We're winning.

Update: More about Al Qaeda's travails here.