GWOT, Four Years Later

Statfor.com just issued their four year status report on the war against Al Qaeda. Although it’s typically full of spelling mistakes, their message is clear:

1. The United States has not been attacked in four years.
2. No Muslim government has fallen to supporters of al Qaeda.
3. The United States won in neither Iraq nor Afghanistan.
4. Bin Laden is still free and ready to go extra rounds.

So far, neither side has won—but on the whole, we’d say the United States has the edge. The war is being fought outside the United States. And that is not a trivial point. But it is not yet a solution to the president’s problems.

Stratfor also makes this point: the biggest intelligence failure was not 9-11 (“only Monday morning quarterbacks can claim that they would have spotted al Qaeda’s plot and been able to block it”). Nor was it WMD in Iraq. (Everyone, even the French, knew that Hussein had weapons.) So what was the biggest mistake? Intelligence said the Iraqis would not fight.

Whoops.