Posted by
Madeline's Dad on Friday, May 23, 2008 1:42:20 PM
They are winning against all odds, overcoming not just terrorists, but other obstacles such as a lumbering Pentagon bureaucracy and weak-kneed Western intelligentsia whose media toadies trump every military error and harp on every isolated bad deed.
Now proven wrong, these same critics retaliate by ignoring what is a very big story.
Worldwide terror attacks have fallen off 40% since 2001, according to a study by Canada's Human Security Report Project, and support for al-Qaida in the Arab world has collapsed. The study found terror attacks had been overcounted because Iraq War atrocities distorted the figures. Security gains elsewhere included even sub-Saharan Africa, where the improvement was called "extraordinary."
Just as the conflict in Iraq is coming to a close, two related terror wars — in Spain and Colombia — are also seeing signs of victory.
Working with France's tough, savvy police forces, Spanish authorities on Tuesday arrested Javier Lopez Pena, the top terrorist of the Marxist ETA group responsible for 800 killings since 1968.
Lopez himself broke a cease-fire negotiated in 2006 and, assuming Spain wouldn't fight, resumed his bombings. His al-Qaida-linked group is now headless and unlikely to cause the same trouble. Sealing ETA's doom was the Spanish government's decision to confront rather than negotiate with the thugs, and then join with France.
Read the whole article.