Nine years and counting

Nine years after the 9/11 attacks, which side is winning the "War on Terror" - or as President Obama's administration has called it, the Overseas Contingency Operation?

Neither. I'm calling it a draw.

On the plus side, the United States won the war in Iraq. Defeatists are uncomfortable with the concept of victory. Thus, they'll use any reason - ranging from the inability of the Iraqis to form a post-election government to our own recession - to deem our victory merely a defeat in waiting.

The obvious and irrefutable weakness in the defeatists' arguments is their de facto support of Saddam Hussein, the dictator who coalition forces overthrew in 2003. To paper over that inconvenient truth, a developing rewrite of history paints Saddam as not such a bad guy after all. My jaw dropped last week when I heard NBC News correspondent Richard Engle, in an analysis of Obama's speech about the end of combat operations, describe Saddam as an emerging moderate in the Middle East who the West felt it could work with.

That assessment is ignorant of reports from numerous human rights organizations that documented how Saddam was, in fact, becoming more brutal toward his people. In the latter years of his regime he decreed that the tongues be cut out of those convicted of the crime of criticizing the government.

The longer Saddam held power, the more fearful he became of a coup. This fear manifested itself in a war plan that served as much to protect Saddam from his own military as it did to defend against coalition forces.

If Saddam was a moderate, so was Genghis Khan.

The road to victory in Iraq was filled with miscalculations, inept leadership (at times) and cultural ignorance, particularly by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who believed wars could be won on the cheap. Once Rumsfeld was history, President George W. Bush ignored naysayers by tapping Gen. David Petraeus to lead a surge of 20,000 additional troops that snatched victory from the jaws of defeat during 2007.

Now, the United States has an Arab democratic ally in the Middle East.

A significant geopolitical cost of the war in Iraq is the emergence of an increasing belligerent Iran. If there was one redeeming value of Saddam's Sunni-led regime, it was as a counter-balance to the Shiite-led Iranian theocracy.

On the other side of the ledger, Islamic jihadists have reason to celebrate on Sept. 11. In addition to the nearly 3,000 people killed on that day in 2001, another 5,700 of our military men and women have perished fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While the end of the Iraqi War is in sight, we're stuck in Afghanistan propping up one of the most corrupt governments in the world.

The Obama administration is emphatic about ending the war through diplomatic means. That probably entails political accommodation for the Taliban, the brutal regime we ousted in 2001 for harboring Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida terrorists. As we all know, bin Laden remains at large today.

While our military pursues militant jihadists overseas, our internal security systems - which suffered colossal failures on Sept. 11, 2001 - have been bulked-up and reorganized. Whether we've become safer remains an open question. While I have no doubt the new security structure has prevented domestic attacks, it's troublesome that recent attempts to kill innocent civilians in Times Square and aboard an airliner over Detroit were discovered only after the bombs failed to detonate.

Even our own military has failed to recognize domestic threats. Less than a year ago, Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan gunned down 12 defenseless fellow soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood, Texas. Hasan is described as a devout Muslim who grew increasingly disenchanted with the U.S. involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Come Saturday, when we mourn the losses of Sept. 11, 2001, we should also remember that our Islamic jihadist enemies will be tallying up their significant successes.