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The world since September 11th IT STANDS to reason that 19 men cannot change history. But they did. Five years and two Americanled wars later, the world created by the September 11th hijackers is a darker place than almost anyone predicted at the start of the new century. Al Qaeda itself may have been battered and dispersed, but the idea it stands for has spread its poison far and wide. The essence of that idea, so far as a coherent one can be distilled from the ferment of broadcasts and fat was issued by Osama bin Laden and his disciples, is that Islam is everywhere under attack by the infidel and that every Muslim has a duty to wage holy war, jihad, in its defence. America is deemed a special target for having trespassed on the Arab heartland. Intoxicated by their defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the jihadists are hungry to topple another superpower. This cause had deadly adherents before the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre in 2001. Mr bin Laden issued his Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders in 1998, the year alQaeda bombed two American embassies in East Africa. But an honest tally of the record since September 11th has to conclude that the number of jihadists and their sympathisers has probably multiplied many times since then. It has multiplied, moreover, partly as a result of the way America responded. | 
