On the third anniversary of 9/11, Mark Steyn wrote the following, and what he wrote remains true on this, the seventh anniversary:

Three years after September 11th, the Islamist death cult is the love whose name no-one dare speak. And, if you can’t even bring yourself to identify your enemy, are you likely to defeat him? Can you even know him? He seems to know us pretty well. He understands the pressures he can bring to bear on Spain, and the Phillipines, and France, too. He’s come to appreciate the self-imposed constraints under which his enemy fights – the legalisms, the political correctness, the deference to ineffectual multilateralism. He’s revolted by the infidels’ decadence but he has to admit it’s enormously helpful: the useful idiots of the pro-gay, pro-feminist left are far more idiotic and far more useful to him than they ever were to Stalin. He’s figured out that while pluralistic open democracy might be a debased system of government next to Sharia, it has its moments: he had no idea quite so many westerners so loathed their own governments and, if not their own, then certainly America’s. And he never thought that, even in America, while one party is at war, the other party is at war with the very idea that there is a war. And even the party committed to war presides over a lethargic unreformed bureaucracy large chunks of which are determined to obstruct it.

So, despite the loss of the Afghan training camps  and Saddam and the Taliban and three-quarters of al-Qaeda’s leadership, it hasn’t been a bad three years: he has learned the limits of the west’s resolve, and all he has to do is put a bit of thought into exploiting it in the years ahead. A nuclear Iran will certainly help.