So Who's Winning?
Is Osama Bin Laden winning the war? It is almost unfathomable, given that he has no country, no sympathy, and only a fanatical following from the ultra-conservatives of the Muslim world. But, if you take a closer look, it is hard not to come to this conclusion. The only question becomes which war are you talking about?

Since he declared this war on the U.S., he has cobbled together a coalition of Muslim terrorists, the now infamous Al Qaeda, who previously had no relation with each other. Kashmiri fighters, Egyptian Brotherhood members, fresh medressa graduates - they have all found a home in his organization. They trained at camps he constructed in Afghanistan, learning how to destroy all things American.

His minions carried out various stunts of terror in the 90s, only to have Washington reply in the most tepid of terms. So, they struck, and struck big, at the heart of American power - its economy and its military. And so successful was the attack (in his terms), that he drew the greatest country in the world into a war that will almost certainly last for years, cost billions in terms of money, inflict heavy amounts of casualties, and generally make the world a better recruitment ground for him and his terror ideals. He has seen his enemy transform from a prosperous, at peace country into an economically depressed, war-mad behemoth, whose friends not only have no sympathy for it, but stay in line not out of respect, but out of fear.

But, that is speaking in terms of the West, of the 'War on Terrorism'. In fact, if spoken in terms of Osama's war, the one he declared in a fatwa in 1994, he is winning in an even more convincing fashion. His fatwa, or religious decree, calling for war against the U.S. states:

In the last two years, the United States has quietly acquiesced on two of the three points - there are no longer any significant amounts of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia (they having been moved to Iraq or Qatar) and the Bush Administration has provided the first ever American vision for a free Palestine. These two political concessions were forced out of the White House - the only reason they came about was the necessity of the Bush Administration to temper their extremely bold unilateralism with some semblance of evenhandedness. Point, Bin Laden.

And, in Iraq, the sanctions have ended. Of course, so has the regime that those sanctions were imposed upon - and this could not have worked out better for Bin Laden and his cohorts. Gone is a despised secular dictator, one who (in Bin Laden's eyes) refused to implement the 'correct' form of extremist Islam. Gone is the man who directly challenged Bin Laden's status as a uniter of the Arab people against the infidels. And in his place is an American army that is unable to control the borders, police the streets, and provides nice fat targets for even more angry, ignorant youth to join Bin Laden's fundamentalist cause.

So - since September 11th, Bin Laden has survived every American effort to kill him, seen almost every demand in his war declaration fulfilled, and received a huge groundswell of support from an even angrier Muslim world. Uh, who exactly is winning this war?