It takes time to see the eventual impact of historic events. The six tumultuous years that have elapsed since Al Qaeda's attack on America have given us enough perspective to begin to assess how that horrendous event has changed the world. Few people now doubt it marked a watershed in relations between the Muslim and Western worlds. But what is also becoming clear is that the long-term results of 9/11 will not be quite what Osama Bin Laden intended.
Several years before 9/11, a source close to Bin Laden told me the Al Qaeda leader's strategic plan was to goad the United States into attacking a major Muslim country and thereby rally the Muslim world to rise up against the West. The first part of the equation clearly worked. The second part will turn out to be an utter failure.
If you don't believe it, just look at the winners and losers so far in what the Bush administration calls the Global War on Terror.
The clearest winner is Iran, the leader of the world's Shia Muslims, who are a minority despised by the Sunni Muslims of Al Qaeda. The immediate effect of 9/11 was that the United States attacked Iran's nearest enemies – the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Result: Iran and its Shia allies in Lebanon are becoming more influential in the Middle East than Al Qaeda. That cannot be what Bin Laden wanted.
Many people think the loser is the United States because its armed forces are stretched thin and bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq. But if you look at the scorecard, it is the Arabs who have suffered the most as the result of 9/11. Far more Arabs have been killed in the civil strife and collateral damage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than American soldiers, and America's civilian losses in the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks were small by comparison. It is the Arabs who are the losers.
Muslims are suffering the most, and in what is now an Iraqi civil war it is the Sunnis who have been hit the hardest - so much so that some of them are joining forces with the American occupiers to help drive Al Qaeda's foreign fighters out of their country. That, too, is certainly not what Bin Laden intended.
On the other hand, Al Qaeda is not and never was an existential threat to the United States or other Western nations. It is a serious, multi-faceted, terrorism problem that is not likely to go away any time soon, but can be better managed through diligent police and intelligence work rather than unilateral military action.
The United States will eventually cut its losses and withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq. It will have learned the hard way that military force is not the best answer to most problems and that even a superpower needs a little help from its friends and can accomplish more through multilateral action and the support of such underestimated organizations as the United Nations. America will eventually emerge sadder but wiser from the quagmire, and therefore stronger. That, too, cannot be what Bin Laden expected.
It has been an expensive lesson for the West, but on this anniversary of 9/11, it seems safe to predict that Osama's plan for the world will backfire.
