Who lost Libya? Indeed, who lost the entire Middle East? Those are the questions lurking behind the endless stream of headlines about “Benghazi-gate.” Here’s the question we should really ask, though: How did a tragic but isolated incident at a U.S. consulate, in a place few Americans had ever heard of, get blown up into a pivotal issue in a too-close-to-call presidential contest?

My short answer: the enduring power of a foreign policy myth that will not die, the decades-old idea that America has an inalienable right to “own” the world and control every place in it. I mean, you can’t lose what you never had.

This campaign season teaches us how little has changed since the early Cold War days when Republican stalwarts screamed, “Who lost China?” More than six decades later, it’s still surprisingly easy to fill the political air with anxiety by charging that we’ve “lost” a country or, worse yet, a whole region that we were somehow supposed to “have.”

The “Who lost...?” formula is something like a magic trick.  There’s no way to grasp how it works until you take your eyes away from those who are shouting alarms and look at what’s going on behind the scenes.

Who’s in Charge Here?

The curious case of the incident in Benghazi was full of surprises from the beginning. It was the rare pundit who didn’t assure us that voters wouldn’t care a whit about foreign affairs this year. It was all going to be “the economy, stupid,” ...

Five big things will decide what this country looks like next year and in the 20 years to follow, but here’s a guarantee for you: you’re not going to hear about them in the upcoming presidential debates. Yes, there will be questions and answers focused on deficits, taxes, Medicare, the Pentagon, and education, to which you already more or less know the responses each candidate will offer.  What you won’t get from either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama is a little genuine tough talk about the actual state of reality in these United States of ours.  And yet, on those five subjects, a little reality would go a long way, while too little reality (as in the debates to come) is a surefire recipe for American decline.

So here’s a brief guide to what you won’t hear this Wednesday or in the other presidential and vice-presidential debates later in the month.  Think of these as five hard truths that will determine the future of this country.

1. Immediate deficit reduction will wipe out any hope of economic recovery: These days, it’s fashionable for any candidate to talk about how quickly he’ll reduce the federal budget deficit, which will total around $1.2 trillion in fiscal 2012.  And you’re going to hear talk about the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan and more like it on Wednesday.  But the hard truth of the matter is that deep deficit reduction anytime soon will be a genuine disaster.  Think of it this way: If you woke up tomorrow and learned that Washington had solved the deficit crisis and you’d lost your job, would you celebrate? Of course not. And yet, any move to immediately reduce the deficit does increase the likelihood that you will ...

The United States never misses an opportunity to castigate other countries for “uncivilized” behavior, and certainly there is enough of that to go around almost anywhere you look in the world. But there’s plenty of it here in the U.S. too.

Just consider the case of Terry Williams.

Williams, a 47-year-old black man, has spent almost 30 years on Pennsylvania’s crowded death row while lawyers appealed his death penalty for two murders committed back when he was a 17 and 18-year old boy. Now he’s about to be killed by the state for those crimes.

At the time he was tried and convicted, although it was known to prosecutors that his two victims were adult men who had forcibly raped Williams when he was as young as 13, and that he had been a victim of sexual abuse since he was six, the jury was not informed about any of this. In recent years, a number of the 12 jurors who originally convicted him and sentenced the teenager to death have now said that had they known about the abuse he suffered -- particularly at the hands of the two men he later killed -- they would have decided the case differently, and certainly would not have voted for the death penalty. Even the wife of one of his victims has pleaded with the state to spare him.

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Jihan Kazerooni and I drove past scores of armed riot police on Budaiya highway as her iPhone buzzed non-stop: phone calls, Skype calls and, incessantly, Twitter. I had wondered what the phrase “Twitter revolution” really meant when I heard it used in connection with Iran in 2009 and Egypt in 2011. Here, in the small Gulf Kingdom of Bahrain, I was beginning to grasp the concept.

I was in that country for three weeks as a part of the Witness Bahrain initiative, a group of internationals seeking to document and expose human rights abuses perpetrated by the regime against protesters and activists. Aside from brief spurts of coverage, the crisis in Bahrain had largely been ignored by the U.S. media.

Perhaps the lack of coverage of the predominantly Shi’a uprising against an increasingly repressive Sunni monarchy can be explained, in part, by this: Washington considers that monarchy its close ally; Bahrain is the home of the Navy’s 5th Fleet, and the beneficiary of U.S. arms sales. Perhaps it has to do with the U.S.-Saudi friendship, and the increasing tension between the U.S. and Iran. Bahrain has been portrayed as a battleground for influence between neighboring Saudi Arabia (a supporter of the monarchy) and nearby majority Shi’a Iran.

Ignoring the revolution underway there and its demands for freedom and democracy is, however, perilous. If activists move from largely peaceful demonstrations toward the use of violence, Bahrain could prove the powder keg that might set the Persian Gulf aflame.  Peaceful activists like Jihan currently hold ...

Dave Eggers’ gem of a book, “A Hologram for the King,” is a parable about the decadence, fragility and heartlessness of late, decayed corporate capitalism. It is about the small, largely colorless men and women who serve as managers in our suicidal outsourcing of manufacturing jobs and the methodical breaking of labor unions. It is about the lie of globalization, a lie that impoverishes us all to increase corporate profits. 

“A Hologram for the King” tells the story of Alan, a lackluster 54-year-old consultant who is desperately trying to snag one final big contract in Saudi Arabia for Reliant, a corporation that is “the largest I.T. supplier in the world,” to save himself from financial ruin. Alan has come to realize that managers like him who made outsourcing possible will be discarded as human refuse now that the process is complete, left to wander like ghosts—or holograms—among the ruins. And Eggers’ novel is a subtle, deft and poignant look at the horrendous toll this corporate process takes on self-esteem, on family, on health, on community and finally on the nation itself. It does so, like parables from Greek tragedy or George Orwell, by finding the perfect story to make a point that is universal. 

Eggers, who showcased his talent as a writer of nonfiction in “Zeitoun” about Hurricane Katrina, combines fiction and reporting to create a small masterpiece. The book works because of its authenticity, its close attention to detail and Eggers’ respect for fact. I spent many months as a correspondent in Saudi Arabia where the novel is set. Eggers captures in tight, bullet-like prose the utter decadence, hypocrisy and corruption of the kingdom, as well as its bleak landscape, suffocating heat and soulless glass and concrete office buildings. He is keenly aware that the outward religiosity and piety mask a moral and physical rot that fits seamlessly ...

During the climactic “Quit India” campaign launched by Gandhi in 1942, there were outbreaks of violence. Earlier, in 1922, similar outbreaks had led him to suspend the non-cooperation movement. This time, however, he said, “let our lamp stay lit in the midst of this hurricane.”

This is very much the precarious situation of nonviolence in Syria today. A bit of background:

In the Quranic version of Cain and Abel, Abel says to his jealous brother,: "If thou dost stretch thy hand against me, to slay me, it is not for me to stretch my hand against thee to slay thee, for I do fear God, the cherisher of the worlds." (Quran 5:28) In other words, the first murder is accompanied by the first act of nonviolence, a refusal to kill, even in self-defense, through mindfulness of a God who stands far above partisan conflict.

Islamic scholar Sheik Jawdat Said based his book, The Doctrine Of The First Son Of Adam, apparently the ...

When President Richard Nixon proclaimed in the early 1970’s that he wanted to secure national energy independence, the United States imported a quarter of its oil. By the decade’s end, after an Arab oil embargo and the Iranian Revolution, domestic production was in decline, Americans were importing half their petroleum needs at 15 times the price, and it was widely believed that the country was running out of natural gas.

Energy shocks contributed to a lethal combination of stagnant economic growth and inflation, and every US president since Nixon likewise has proclaimed energy independence as a goal. But few people took those promises seriously.

Today, energy experts no longer scoff. By the end of this decade, according to the US Energy Information Administration, nearly half of the crude oil that America consumes will be produced at home, while 82% will come from the US side of the Atlantic. Philip Verleger, a respected energy analyst, argues that, by 2023, the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s “Project Independence,” the US will be energy independent in the sense that it will export more energy than it imports.

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Madam President, the American people are angry.  

They are angry because they are living through the worst recession since the great depression. 

Unemployment is not 8.2%, real unemployment is closer to 15%. 

Young people who are graduating high school and graduating college, they're going out into the world, they want to become independent, they want to work, and there are no jobs. 

There are workers out there 50, 55 years old who intended to work the remainder of their working lives, suddenly they got a pink slip, their self-esteem is destroyed, they're never going to have another job again and now they're worried about their retirement security. 

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The Environmental Protection Agency has issued a $1 million fine against a global plastics producer for alleged Clean Air Act violations at its plants in two small, polluted communities seven hours apart in Alabama and Indiana.

The civil penalty against SABIC Innovative Plastics, announced May 31, targets leak detection and repair failings that resulted in hundreds of tons of hazardous air pollutant releases every year, the federal agency said.

SABIC, a global producer of polymers and thermoplastics, is a top employer in the two towns involved: Burkville, a rural community best known for hosting Alabama’s annual Okra Festival, and Mount Vernon, a town of just under 6,700 nestled in the southernmost tip of Indiana.

The EPA’s 15-count complaint said SABIC skirted Clean Air Act rules on monitoring and repairing equipment leaks, complying with chemical plant regulations and reporting known violations. SABIC agreed to the penalty to settle the case.

The Mount Vernon plant recently won several environmental awards. In 2011, the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable recognized it with a Most Valuable Pollution Prevention award. This April, the plant won three Responsible Care Energy Efficiency Awards from the American Chemistry Council.

SABIC said in a news release at the time that such recognition demonstrates its commitment to “minimize environmental impact while strengthening operational excellence.”

Now, SABIC must reform its monitoring practices, replace valves, reengineer emission controls and invest in an environmental project to control hazardous air emissions. The upgrades will cost the ...

The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land.  Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi Arabia” for “tough energy” -- deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas.  But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere?  Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?

Once upon a time, the giant U.S. oil companies -- Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco -- got their start in North America, launching an oil boom that lasted a century and made the U.S. the planet’s dominant energy producer.  But most of those companies have long since turned elsewhere for new sources of oil.

Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America -- the Third World -- where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.

Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: ...

Today’s fragile global economy faces many risks: the risk of another flare-up of the eurozone crisis; the risk of a worse-than-expected slowdown in China; and the risk that economic recovery in the United States will fizzle (yet again). But no risk is more serious than that posed by a further spike in oil prices.

The price of a barrel of Brent crude, which was well below $100 in 2011, recently peaked at $125. Gasoline prices in the US are approaching $4 a gallon, a damaging threshold for consumer confidence, and will increase further during the high-demand summer season.

The reason is fear. Not only are oil supplies plentiful, but demand in the US and Europe has been lower, owing to decreasing car use in the last few years and weak or negative GDP growth in the US and the eurozone. Simply put, increasing worry about a military conflict between Israel and Iran has created a “fear premium.”

The last three global recessions (prior to 2008) were each caused by a geopolitical shock in the Middle East that led to a sharp spike in oil prices. The 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and the ...

Exclusive: New Iranian Commando Team Operating Near U.S.

(Tehran, FNA) The Fars News Agency has confirmed with the Republican Guard’s North American Operations Command that a new elite Iranian commando team is operating in the U.S.-Mexican border region. The primary day-to-day mission of the team, known as the Joint Special Operations Gulf of Mexico Task Force, or JSOG-MTF, is to mentor Mexican military units in the border areas in their war with the deadly drug cartels.  The task force provides “highly trained personnel that excel in uncertain environments,” Maj. Amir Arastoo, a spokesman for Republican Guard special operations forces in North America, tells Fars, and “seeks to confront irregular threats...”

The unit began its existence in mid-2009 -- around the time that Washington rejected the Iranian leadership’s wish for a new diplomatic dialogue. But whatever the task force does about the United States -- or might do in the future -- is a sensitive subject with the Republican Guard.  “It would be inappropriate to ...

Barack Obama will be re-elected not as a vindication of his policies but because the Republicans are incapable of providing a reasonable challenge to his flawed performance. On the central issue of our time—reigning in the greed of the multinational corporations, led by the financial sector and the defense industry—a Republican presidential victor, with the possible exception of the now-sidelined Ron Paul, would do far less to challenge the kleptocracy of corporate-dominated governance.

As compared to front-runner Mitt Romney, who wants to derail even Obama’s tepid efforts at regulating Wall Street, and who seeks ever more wasteful increases in military spending, the incumbent president appears relatively enlightened, but that is cold comfort.

Not only has Obama been a savior of the banking conglomerates that so generously financed his campaign, but he also has proved to be equally as solicitous of the needs of the military-industrial complex. He entered his re-election year by signing a $662 billion defense authorization bill that strips away some of our most fundamental liberties and keeps military spending at Cold War levels, and by approving a $60 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

Those two actions represent an obvious contradiction, since the attack on American soil that kept defense spending so high in the post-9/11 decade was carried out by 15 Saudis and four other men directed by Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi primarily using funding from his native land. Now Saudi Arabia is to be protected as a holdout against the democratic impulse of the Arab Spring because it is our ally against Iran, a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11. Saudi Arabia, it should be recalled, was one of only three nations, along with the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan, to recognize the Taliban government that harbored bin Laden ...

 The recent escalation in Iranian threats to blockade oil shipments and attack U.S. Navy vessels are meant to push up the price of oil and divert domestic opinion from an economic crisis but are not likely to lead to a war in the Persian Gulf, in the view of Iran experts.
 

Should Iran retaliate for impending new sanctions against its oil exports, it is more apt to target oil production in its neighbor, Iraq, than foreign tankers in the Gulf. 
 

"We've seen this movie before," Cliff Kupchan, an Iran analyst at the Eurasia Group, told IPS on Wednesday, referring to Iran's defiant rhetoric and firm U.S. response. "Neither side wants a war. A lot of this rhetoric is overstated." 
 

While there is always a chance for miscalculation in the crowded waters of the Gulf, a clash of words is more useful to Tehran than actual hostilities. 
 

On Tuesday, after Iranian armed forces commander Gen. Ataollah Salehi warned that a U.S. aircraft carrier that left the Gulf last week should not return, the price of oil jumped four percent. 
 

The United States has also benefited from the tensions, recently concluding deals to sell Saudi Arabia 30 billion dollars in advanced weaponry and 3.5 billion dollars in arms to the United Arab Emirates. 
 

Despite threats last week to close the Strait of Hormuz, the choke point between Iran and Oman for much of the world's tanker-borne oil, Iran is not in a position to keep the waterway closed. 
 

During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, Iran used mines and small boats to attack 190 ships from 31 nations, killing at least 63 sailors, according to David Crist, who wrote a history of naval encounters in the Gulf for The Washington Institute for Near East Policy in 2009. However, the U.S. and allied navies kept the Gulf open for tanker traffic and Iran suffered significant ...

A once-secret Guantánamo cellblock now used to punish captives was built in November 2007 for $690,000 from a crude, then 5-year-old temporary prison camp design.

Navy Cmdr. Tamsen Reese confirmed the existence of the block earlier in December, and released a photo of one steel-walled cell after detainee defenders called conditions inhumane. It’s called Camp Five-Echo, and “serves as a disciplinary block for those non-compliant detainees in Camps 5 and 6,” Reese said in an email Friday that for the first time revealed the cost of the 4-year-old prison camps construction project.

Fewer than 150 of Guantánamo’s 171 captives are kept in Camps 5 and 6, which are steel and cement penitentiary-style copies of U.S. prisons. Former CIA prisoners are held elsewhere at a secret site at the remote Navy base, Camp 7, a jail whose price tag the Pentagon won’t reveal.

As for Five-Echo, it’s a separate 24-unit boxcar-style cellblock on the grounds of Camp 5. Its design comes from the detention center’s earliest days, 2002, when contract laborers welded cellblocks from old shipping containers. But there’s a key difference: In the original design, the cells had a see-through metal mesh that allowed captives to communicate with and see others. For “the disciplinary block,” the military had workers weld in steel walls, sealing off each cell from the ...

More than five years have passed since Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah last received Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al Maliki. The Saudi monarch views Maliki as untrustworthy and, even worse, "an Iranian agent."

Saudi Arabia doesn't allow direct flights between its capital, Riyadh, and Baghdad, and it doesn't permit direct trade between the two countries. The kingdom is building a fence along the closed 500-mile border.

This, too, is a legacy of the U.S. invasion of Iraq as U.S. troops complete their withdrawal: a bitter enmity between two close U.S. allies, with an underlay of sectarian animosity, that the United States cannot seem to ameliorate.

It is an irony, because the U.S. first sent troops to the region in part to protect Saudi Arabia in the wake of Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Thirteen years later, however, when the U.S. invaded Iraq to topple Saddam, Saudi rulers were highly critical. And they have remained opposed to or offended by almost everything that has happened since.

Saudi Arabia refuses to set up an embassy in Baghdad, and while it has allowed Iraq to set up a mission in Riyadh, its officials receive Iraqi government officials only as private individuals.

The Saudis charge that Iraq has come under the sway of Saudi archrival Iran. But they themselves have also tried to affect Iraqi internal politics: they've thrown their support and funds behind Ayad Allawi, Maliki's main political rival, who's blocked the appointment of top security officials in the Iraqi government.

"We're trying to contain them ... it's a sectarian government," said an adviser to the Saudi government who agreed to discuss the delicate Saudi-Iraqi relations anonymously because he wasn't authorized to speak to the media.

For its part, Iraq charges that insurgents are ...

Sweden, the United Kingdom and Germany are the top countries to fight climate change, according to the 2012 Climate Change Performance Index, whose results were published at the United Nations climate change summit today.
 

Sweden, the country with the lowest emission levels of 50,600 tons of CO2 emissions, according to the latest data from the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA), and good emission trends worldwide, was ranked 4th. 
 

Experts said they could not award any country with the top three rankings, as no nation was doing enough to prevent climate change. 
 

The three lowest-ranking countries are Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Iran. The index is compiled each year by environmental lobby organization Germanwatch and the Climate Action Network (CAN), which evaluate and compare the climate protection performance of the 58 countries worldwide which are together responsible for more than 90 percent of global energy-related CO2-emissions. 
 

"This year’s results signify that although globally emissions are still growing, none of the big emitters make the real shifts that are needed," said CAN Europe director Wendel Trio. "None of them is considered as doing enough." 
 

Sweden’s climate policy was not ambitious enough, while the UK, ranked 5th, had recently shown worrying signs. It had failed to tighten up its carbon budgets, while Germany’s emission levels remained too high for a placement higher than rank 6. 
 

"The average grades for the national and international policies are weak," said Germanwatch researcher Jan Burck, one of the authors of the ...

While Europe remains preoccupied with its own slow-motion crisis, and other global powers continue to be mesmerized by the bizarre spectacle of European officials’ myriad efforts to rescue the euro (and thus the global financial system), clouds of war are massing over Iran once more.

For years, Iran has been pursuing both a nuclear program and the development of long-range missiles, which points to only one conclusion: the country’s leaders are intent on building nuclear weapons, or at least on reaching the technological threshold beyond which only a single political decision is required to achieve that end.

The latter course would arguably keep Iran within the scope of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which it is a signatory. But there can be no reasonable doubt about the Iranian leadership’s intentions. Otherwise, Iran’s nuclear and missile programs would be a pointless waste of money. After all, Iran does not need uranium-enrichment technology. The country has only one civilian nuclear reactor, with fuel rods supplied by Russia, and the Iranian technology now being developed cannot be used in it.

But uranium enrichment makes a lot of sense if you want a nuclear weapon; indeed, for that purpose, enrichment is indispensable. Moreover, Iran is building a heavy-water reactor, supposedly for research purposes, but which is also needed to build a plutonium bomb.

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Iran has, in violation of the NPT, hidden substantial parts of this program. The country has also spent millions of dollars on illegal purchases of enrichment ...

U.S. Justice Department charges that elements of Iran's government were behind a foiled plot on the life of Saudi Arabia's U.S. ambassador have boggled the minds of many Americans knowledgeable about both Iran and terrorism.

The alleged target and modus operandi – employing a Mexican drug cartel to blow up Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir at a Washington restaurant – are unusual, to say the least, for a government that has focused on political dissidents and theatres of war closer to home.

"Fishy, fishy, fishy,'' Bruce Riedel, a CIA veteran who was formerly in charge of the Near East and South Asia on the White House National Security Council, told IPS. "That Iran engages in assassinations is old news. That it would use a Mexican drug cartel would be new."

Iran has not been behind a political assassination in the United States since a year after the 1979 revolution, when an African-American convert to Islam, Daoud Salahuddin, killed the former press attaché at the Iranian Embassy, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, in a Washington suburb.

Iran was also responsible for assassinations of Iranian dissidents in Europe in the 1980s and early 1990s but used its own agents or members of Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite organization that Iran helped create following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Hezbollah is believed responsible for the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and a spate of other bombings and abductions in Lebanon.

More recently, Iran has allegedly backed local proxies responsible for the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

U.S. experts on Iranian spy agencies and tradecraft say the hare-brained scheme ...

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America and Oil.  It’s like bacon and eggs, Batman and Robin.  As the old song lyric went, you can’t have one without the other.  Once upon a time, it was also a surefire formula for national greatness and global preeminence.  Now, it’s a guarantee of a trip to hell in a hand basket.  The Chinese know it.  Does Washington?

America’s rise to economic and military supremacy was fueled in no small measure by its control over the world’s supply of oil.  Oil powered the country’s first giant corporations, ensured success in World War II, and underlay the great economic boom of the postwar period.  Even in an era of nuclear weapons, it was the global deployment of oil-powered ships, helicopters, planes, tanks, and missiles that sustained America’s superpower status during and after the Cold War.  It should come as no surprise, then, that the country’s current economic and military decline coincides with the relative decline of oil as a major source of energy.

If you want proof of that economic decline, just check out the way America's share of the world's gross domestic product has been steadily dropping, while its once-powerhouse ...

Accumulating strains between the United States and Saudi Arabia are steadily weakening one of the world's longest lasting and most effective bilateral alliances, according to observers here.
 

The latest point of contention – Washington's opposition to this month's anticipated bid by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) for statehood – is only one of a number of issues, ranging from how to react to the so-called "Arab Spring" to the price of oil, that threaten the relationship. 
 

"We're seeing an increasingly transactional relationship," according to former ambassador Chas Freeman, who served as Washington's top diplomat in Riyadh during the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. 

Washington has been losing credibility with the Saudis since even before the 9/11 attacks when Israel ignored President George W. Bush's pleas to ease its repression during the second Palestinian intifada, Freeman noted. He spoke at a forum on U.S.-Saudi relations here Monday co-sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center (GRC). 
 

Prof. Gregory Gause, a prominent Saudi expert at the University of Vermont, agreed. "The relationship is now based more on common interests than on a shared worldview," he said. "What keeps it together is the lack of an alternative." 
 

The increasingly fraught relationship was brought home once again Monday when Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former director of Saudi Arabia's intelligence forces who also served as ambassador here from 2005 to 2007, published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled "Veto a State, Lose an Ally". 
 

If Washington does not support the Palestinian bid for U.N. membership, "Saudi Arabia would no longer be able to cooperate with America in the same way it ...

Osama bin Laden didn't live to see the 10^th anniversary of September 11. And his organization, according to many U.S. government insiders, is on its last legs since his death at the hands of U.S. Special Forces in May. "We're within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently observed. Others disagree, pointing to the strength of al-Qaeda in Yemen.

Both sides are wrong. In fact, al-Qaeda had lost its battle even before September 11, 2001. For all the pain and suffering that the terrorist attacks caused Americans, al-Qaeda's mission wasn't focused on the United States, but rather on transforming the Muslim world. The Muslim world, however, wasn't listening. Only 10 years later, with the turmoil of the Arab Spring still ongoing and the United States slowly and painfully trying to extricate itself from the quagmires in which it got drawn, can we finally begin to understand the larger significance of 9/11.

Al-Qaeda was certainly devoted to rolling back U.S. influence in the Islamic world, particularly in Saudi Arabia. But its primary audience was Muslims. Its radical objective of recreating a global caliphate was part of a debate on how to engage with modernity that has been taking place among Muslims for at least 150 years.

Except for a few marginal groups — the Taliban in Afghanistan and some small non-state actors like Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan — al-Qaeda lost this debate before September 11. The Muslim world, from conservative Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia to radical Marxists in the Palestinian liberation movement, had definitively embraced nation-states and the international system. The fraction of the Muslim world that embraced violent means to rebuild a world based on Sharia law was getting progressively smaller.

Indeed, the Muslim world not only rejected al-Qaeda, it embraced the terrorist organization's antithesis. Even before the ...

Saudi Arabia is widely perceived as leading the counter-revolution against the Arab Spring uprisings. In reality, the Kingdom’s response is centered, as its foreign and domestic policy has long been, on “stability.” The Saudis don’t want anti-Saudi forces, including such enemies as Iran and Al Qaeda, to increase their influence in the Middle East.

Some of the older Saudi leaders have seen this movie before. The nationalist revolutions of the 1950’s and 1960’s, inspired and galvanized by Gamel Nasser’s Egypt, nearly toppled the House of Saud. Nonetheless, today’s Saudi princes appear to recognize that something has genuinely changed in the Middle East: The younger generation of Arabs is no longer prepared to accept unaccountable, corrupt, and brutal governments.

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Saudi ...