In the seven years since the September 11 attacks, both al Qa’eda’s violent attempts to establish a new Islamic ummah and America’s ambitious effort to redraw the Middle Eastern political landscape have failed dramatically, according to a French expert on Middle Eastern politics.
The professor argues that the lack of aprogress in America’s aggressive policies in the Middle East proves the US is not the world’s only major political actor and shows the limits of military might as a means of engineering social and political change.

But even as US efforts have been stymied in the Middle East, their declared enemy, al Qa’eda, has met with substantial failure as well.
Al Qa’eda’s stated goal of gaining support among Muslims for a global political ummah have “proved to be a failure”, as have their hopes of transforming Iraq into an “Afghanistan of the 1980s”, where jihadi guerrillas successfully expelled a Soviet invasion, he said.

Al Qaeda and other fundamentalist Islamic groups consider the ummah to be a pan-national “community of believers” encompassing the original Islamic caliphate that stretched, at its height in the 7th century, from Spain to South Asia.